The Assassin’s Creed Adaptation Gets A New Release Date
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In roughly a year and a half, we’re going to experience one of the best movie going summer seasons of the new millennium. Summer 2015 is already scheduled to be full of sci-fi films and big time sequels crashing into theaters near you. Almost every week during has something to offer genre fans, including Independence Day 2, Terminator 5, or The Avengers: Age of Ultron, the but the winter will also see its fair share of big movies. If nothing else, Star Wars: Episode VII. To avoid a bottleneck, Twentieth Century Fox announced that they’re pushing back a few of their tent pole feature films for that particular year.
Exhibitor Relations tweeted the news that the adaptation of the popular videogame Assassin’s Creed will be moved from June 19, 2015 to August 7. The film will now follow Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel: Batman vs. Superman by two weeks, and Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man by one. Ant-Man is the highly anticipated the start of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase Three. Assassin’s Creed also now opens one week before the third Smurfs movie, so there’ll be some stiff competition there.
Fox pushed Assassin’s Creed to make way for Josh Trank’s (Chronicle) Fantastic Four reboot, originally slated for March 6, 2015, but now sitting pretty on Assassin’s Creed’s June 19 release date. Now Fantastic Four will square off against the Batman and Superman. Box office analysts and comic book fans will finally see which movie studio moviegoers prefer: Marvel or DC Comics.
The move to August fits Assassin’s Creed better than opening the film in the heart of July. While the games are popular, the property remains a big question mark with general audiences. Moving the film to August makes it easier for moviegoers to discover a film that is really for a niche crowd. Also, the Michael Fassbender-produced film doesn’t have to go up against Jurassic World and the sequel to Seth MacFarlane’s Ted.
Fox, New Regency Productions, and Ubisoft are working hard to finally bring Assassin’s Creed to the big screen. Frank Marshall (Jurassic World, Indiana Jones) is producing, while screenwriter Scott Frank (Minority Report, The Wolverine) was hired to rewrite the screenplay. Michael Lesslie, who wrote the first draft, will make his feature film debut.
Movies based on video games have a checkered past—Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter, or Silent Hill. In my estimation, there has yet to be one video game adaptation that has been any good, but they keep trying. Assassin’s Creed might finally prove that a video game movie adaptation can work with critics and audiences alike. The film has talented people behind it already, it just needs a cast and a solid director.
