Woe betide the long suffering movie, whose standard of quality has long been measured by shoehorned fan service and productions headed by Hollywood types that rarely even try to understand the essence of the source material. (Case in point: David O. Russell’s ill-fated justice-meting Sopranos-esque Uncharted script.)
Assassin’s Creed could have a different fate, if screenwriter Scott Frank, who most recently wrote this summer’s X-Men Origins follow-up The Wolverine, has anything to say about it. Frank is coming at the source material with the prior knowledge of working on a well-established character, after all – and in a recent interview with Creative Screenwriter Frank acknowledged that re-writes in this arena are a different sort of puzzle.
Though he didn’t have much to say about Assassin’s Creed as a film project just yet, the interview goes pretty in-depth with his take on adapting Wolverine as a character, and you can probably extrapolate how this may inform Ubisoft’s big-budget Michael Fassbender-produced-and-starring adaptation, which is slated for a Summer 2015 release.
“The challenge is a lot of people have a vested interest in the franchise and have ownership of the franchise, whether they’re such huge fans of the franchise that they don’t want to see it marred,” Frank said. “The biggest reward is that if there is something that pre-exists that you’re a fan of, you get to write in the voice of a character you’ve already grown to love.”
In any case, Assassin’s Creed’s historical bent and labyrinthine plot should theoretically make for better viewing than a Far Cry film. Check out the full interview at the link below.
Via Creative Screenwriting
