A show based on 'Assassin's Creed' is coming from the director of Netflix's new game series
The man behind Netflix's new video game-derived "Castlevania" show apparently has another video game adaptation in the works: "Assassin's Creed."
"Assassin's Creed" is a third-person action series from French publisher Ubisoft, and is already both a blockbuster game franchise with near-annual releases, and a Michael Fassbender-helmed movie (to say nothing of comics and other forms of media the series has expanded into).
Now it seems that Adi Shankar, known most recently for being the director behind Netflix's "Castlevania" show, will give the series his own spin. Shankar's previous projects include several movies ("The Grey," "Dredd," and "Machine Gun Preacher"); the "Castlevania" adaptation is his first show for Netflix.
Shankar revealed the project, and his involvement, in a Facebook post over the weekend:
"I'm happy to let you guys know that I've selected my next project! I played the first edition of Assassin's Creed the year I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my dream. At that moment I knew absolutely no one in the industry and could never have imagined that one day Ubisoft would ask me to take the world of 'Assassin's Creed' and create an original story set in it as an anime series. If anyone tells you not to follow your passion in life they are wrong."
It sounds like the project is still in early days, but we can glean a few tidbits from Shankar's statement.
First and foremost: This isn't a show based on any of the (many) games in the series. Though characters from those games might appear in the show, it seems unlikely that, say, Ezio Auditore is the main character.
It also seems unlikely that the show will be set in any of the main time periods of past games - those have included everything from the Revolutionary War-era Northeastern United States to Ptolemaic Egypt. Since the core of the franchise exists outside of any particular time period, the new show can technically be set whenever it wants.
The one other piece of information we can glean from Shankar's Facebook post is the nature of the show: It's an "anime series." It's not clear if this means it's drawn in the style of traditional Japanese anime, or if it's being produced with Japanese anime creators - we've asked Shankar for more info and haven't heard back as of publishing.
What we do know, however, is that Shankar's "Castlevania" series is animated, and it's got a particularly distinct art style:
It's not clear if the project is another Netflix production, or if it's solely a collaboration between Shankar and Ubisoft.
There is no release date, name, or additional information about the "Assassin's Creed" show, though we expect to hear more soon - after all, a new "Assassin's Creed" game is only a few months away.