Netflix's Assassin's Creed series must avoid both the game franchises and the earlier adaptation's biggest mistake. During the Ubisoft Forward event on September 10th, 2022, the game company revealed the future of the franchise after the release of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla in 2020. One of the announcements made by Ubisoft was a further update on the Netflix series that was initially announced in 2016 and, while no significant information was given, the series is still going ahead and must tackle one of the franchise's most difficult aspects.
The series will not be the first time a studio has attempted to adapt one of gaming's biggest franchises for live-action after a movie was released in 2016. The movie starred Michael Fassbender, of Alien: Covenant and X-Men fame, and was made to be an original story set in the same universe as the games. However, despite the promising cast and significant budget awarded to the film, it received negative reviews from fans and critics alike, mostly for its adaptation of the game's most complex storyline.
That storyline, which the Netflix series must streamline, is the franchise's modern-day sections. In both the games and 2016's Assassin's Creed, the story is split between the Assassin's Brotherhood of the past and the same iteration of the group in the present. In the games, often the most beloved aspects, and certainly the easier parts of the story to understand, come in the historical settings. Where the franchise often loses its footing due to the sheer complexity of the storyline is in the modern-day setting, something that plagued the 2016 adaptation that Netflix's Assassin's Creed must look to avoid.
Assassin's Creed Movie Story Was Too Complicated
Assassin's Creed was a faithful adaptation to the games albeit too faithful in that it carried on the game's most complicated elements. One of these elements was the jumping of timelines throughout history, which often makes for the least-loved aspects of the games. For example, the movie focuses on Michael Fassbender's character, Cal. Cal's story mainly takes place across three different periods. In the modern-day, one of those periods is in 1986 when Cal was a teenager and witnessed his mother's death at the hands of his father, with another being in 2016 when Cal is hired by Abstergo. Through Abstergo, Cal enters the Animus which allows him to relive his ancestor's memories, an assassin from the 15th century.
The continuous jumping between time periods makes the film's story overly complex, and simply makes the film a mess as a result, a mistake Netflix's Assassin's Creed must avoid. Furthermore, the movie chose to adapt the Animus differently from the games by having modern-day Cal actually perform the moves made by his ancestor. This caused even more unnecessary time jumps, with the film constantly cutting between Cal in the Animus and his ancestor, Aguilar, in the past. As is obvious by this overly long plot explanation, the film is entirely too contrived. On top of this, the film focuses on characters outside of Cal, including other modern-day assassins and a Templar named Sofia. All of this allows for a story that is completely unfocused and overly complicated, largely resulting in the film's negative reception.
Netflix and its Assassin's Creed series, (one of many video game-based TV shows) must avoid this overly complicated plot point. While the series should not completely remove the modern-day section of the games, Netflix needs to find a way to streamline the story in a way the film adaptation could not. The way in which the series should do this is by slightly changing the game's modern-day story to focus on one particular character. In the games, the present story has largely been split between two characters, Desmond Miles and Layla Hassan. This caused the story to become more complex than ever, especially with the insistence on tying the modern stories into the past which endlessly switches time periods and historical assassins.
In focusing on one of these characters, and rewriting the game's modern story slightly to fit just one, Netflix's series would already be fixing one of the game franchises' biggest mistakes. While the Assassin's Creed movie attempted to do this, by focusing on one character in Cal, the needless changes to the Animus from the game and the 50/50 split between past and present still caused the story to be overly complicated. In the games, the historical sections are often favored with the vast majority of most games taking place in the past. Netflix's series, on top of focusing on only one modern-day character, needs to return to this and allow the majority of the story to take place in the often more engaging historical setting of its story.
In doing so, not only will the modern sections be more streamlined and much less complex, but the historical sections of the game can focus on just one assassin. For example, should Netflix adapt Desmond Miles' Assassin's Creed story in the present, his historical ancestor Ezio can be the main focal point of the past sections of the series as was the case with the three Assassin's Creed games centered on Ezio and Desmond. In centering the story on one modern protagonist, and keeping the balance between history and present that the games often employ, Netflix can avoid the main mistake made by 2016's Assassin's Creed.