Ubisoft has made it clear on numerous occasions that they want to get in on the movie business, but that didn't exactly work out too well for them last month when Assassin's Creed was released to scathing reviews and a mediocre performance at the box office. However, they're clearly going to try again with Splinter Cell, a movie which was announced around the same time as Assassin's Creed.
Nothing seems to have happened with it since we learned that Tom Hardy will play Sam Fisher, but producer Basil Iwanyk has now shed some light on what exactly we should expect from the movie.
"The challenge of making ‘Splinter Cell’ interesting was we didn’t have this IP with a very specific backstory. That allowed us to make up our own world and really augment and fill out the characters. I don’t think one applies to the other because I don’t think our movie will feel like a movie that came out of a video game, I think it’ll feel like a badass, Tom Hardy action movie, which is what we wanted."
So...it's a video game movie that's not going to be a video game movie? Seeing as they're all pretty awful, that's probably not a bad thing, and Iwanyk went on to confirm that both a script is in place and that after getting Hardy's approval, they're hoping to start moving forward at last (it's about time).
"We’re definitely going to make it a hard PG-13. No, it’s not going to be like [John] Wick,’ but it’s going to be badass,” he said. “The good and the bad news is that, obviously, the Bond movies have had a resurgence and the Jason Bourne movies are the Jason Bourne movies, so we’re trying to stay away from those movies in terms of tone, in terms of bad guys, in terms of settings. What’s a world that we haven’t seen yet? What’s an area of the world and a conflict that we haven’t really touched upon in movies in a long time, to make it feel fresh?"
What do you guys think of these comments on the Splinter Cell movie? It certainly sounds pretty great, but so too did Warcraft and Assassin's Creed, so it may be too soon to start getting excited! We'll see...