Assassin’s Creed Deal shocks Hollywood

[smile72]

Last month, Variety reported that Sony will soon be signing a deal to adapt Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft's massively successful video game franchise. But Vulture has learned that this is no ordinary rights deal: With Creed one of the highest-selling modern game franchises (three installments have sold 30 million copies globally), Ubisoft was able to demand and receive an unheard of amount of control over the project. To make the deal, Sony had to grant the gaming company approval over just about everything — budget, principal cast, script, release date — and Hollywood spectators are flabbergasted. Notes one incredulous insider, “As a director, even Steven Spielberg cannot get this kind of deal.” And yet it's this very overarching power that may doom the project, as it has other gigantic video game movies. Notes one Hollywood talent agent who represents a smaller video game publisher, "The whole Ubisoft/Sony deal is a waste of ink, paper and time. The level of control Sony gave up means, effectively, that Assassin’s Creed will never — and I mean never — get made.”

As a director, Spielberg may not get this kind of creative control, and as a studio chief he would never give it: DreamWorks was among the first to pass on the Creed project. Universal and Warner Bros. both proceeded down the road with Ubisoft for a time, and insiders say they too were ultimately put off by the game-makers' demands. Explains one incredulous studio chief who ultimately dropped out of the bidding, “They want to be able to pull the plug on the whole movie’s development if they decide to. It’s ridiculous.”

From most execs' perspective, the idea that a video game company would tell a studio how to make a movie seems ludicrous. “It's [Ubisoft’s] billion-dollar brand, so I get that they're protective,” says another head of a different studio that hung in longer than DreamWorks, but ultimately passed. The exec adds, “But they're not moviemakers, and the only way to make sure it's a bad movie is to undervalue what movie studios do — and this is a deal that totally undervalues what movie studios do.”

Sony, for its part, sees it differently. The studio declined to comment, but one source with knowledge of the proposed deal explained that the reason Ubisoft secured some additional creative control was because the game publisher is spending a great deal of their own money to develop the project, an adventure about a modern-day hero who’s able to experience and inhabit the memories of his assassin ancestors. With Ubisoft kicking in so much of its own capital, says the source, Sony is investing "only a fraction of what a studio typically would spend to option or develop a script” — and on a title enjoying massive, built-in appeal.

Ubisoft believes that its deal with Sony solves the game-maker’s Prince of Persia problem. PoP is an Ubisoft title, and one person familiar with its gaming execs' thinking tells us that they believe that last summer's Disney blockbuster adaptation bombed partly because Ubisoft didn’t have enough control. (Predictably, Disney insiders say the problem was that Ubisoft had too much influence, and that though the franchise was well-known among gamers, it didn’t have the phenomenon status or broad appeal of Creed.)

For years, Hollywood has tried and failed to get video game publishers to let them license their most popular titles (like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto), but top publishers like Activision and Rockstar Games have begged off, believing their franchises to be worth far more than the potential downside of any movie incarnation. After all, in its first weekend in release, GTA IV posted more than $500 million in sales — and that was back in 2008.

Even when game companies do attempt to turn their biggest sellers into films, they often do it with such worry and micromanagement that the projects are doomed to never work out. Half a dozen years ago, Microsoft deliberately began working outside the studio system, paying screenwriter Alex Garland (28 Days Later) a million dollars to fashion an original script based on its megaselling Halo before even a single Hollywood studio had signed on to finance or distribute the movie. Most studios passed when Microsoft demanded the richest intellectual property deal in the history of Hollywood: $10 million against 15 percent of the gross of the film. Fox and Universal finally agreed to pay $5 million to jointly option Halo and pay Microsoft 10 percent of its eventual theatrical gross, but when such heavyweights as producer Peter Jackson and director Neill Blomkamp (District 9) came aboard, each also demanding a slice of the gross, the project collapsed under its own weight of influence.

Meanwhile, Sony has also been working on an adaptation of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, which, as a Sony Computer Entertainment game, is part of the corporate family. But that kinship has made the geek side of the Sony family no easier to please: David O. Russell was signed on to direct and write a script, and agency sources say that he turned in a strong draft, but SCE felt it departed too much from the video game's canon. (A Sony studio spokesman also declined to comment on the status of that project.)

To be fair, game publishers have little evidence to believe that Hollywood can be trusted with doing their product proud. A list of video game movies has very little in common with a list of good movies: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Max Payne, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark … only when you hit the Tomb Raider films do you get to anything resembling a success. But wanting to protect a video game brand seems like it's more a matter of pride for these companies than an actual legitimate fiscal concern. After all, the first major film to be adapted from a video game, 1993’s Super Mario Bros., was an abject failure, but it did nothing to dampen enthusiasm for Mario and Luigi, who went on to sell tens of millions of copies as the best-selling franchise of the next twenty years.
Like Mario Bros. when its dog of a movie came out, Assassin's Creed is still huge. A fourth installment, Revelations (due out November 15), will likely sell millions of copies, and Ubisoft is feeling protective, even if a bad movie won't logically scar this monster. “It begs the question,” says one studio chief, “If they’re so afraid of what will happen to their franchises, why make a movie at all?”

Opinion?????

Source:http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/11/assassins_creed_movie_sony_ubi.html

 

[Deleted_171835]

 

[smile72]

Those are all terrible remakes of some great and decent games. It makes me wonder how selfish Hollywood is. How they have to control everything.

 

[KingVamp]

IDK I understand that it their game that they want to protect,but at the same time I understand "You are not a movie maker."

About adaptions, I think they can go a little away from the game,but not to much. I think it may be better if a movie is built from the ground up and not follow a game.

I think they should have some rights because if I made a awesome game( which is one of the things I would like to do), I would see myself trying to protect it too.

 

[Ace]

Those are all terrible remakes of some great and decent games. It makes me wonder how selfish Hollywood is. How they have to control everything.

Notice how one of the tags for that picture is "Industry Bull"... take a wild guess to what they're implying?

Still, I'm rooting for Ubisoft here to let the game's producers get a foot through the door to this movie. I don't want a Hollywood version of this on the big screen: I want the creators vision, something Hollywood would never do.

 

[raulpica]

Hey, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time wasn't that bad of a movie

As for this one... well... Good luck Sony. You WILL need it.

 

[Guild McCommunist]

Video game movies are just stupid ideas. Why do I need a movie to tell me a story I can already learn from playing the game? With books, you have to visualize yourself, and having a movie based on the book sees what you visualized or what the author intended come to life. Like Lord of the Rings is one of the largest works of fantasy in the world. The movie adaptations (which were great) were able to bring it alive and let people know about the epic franchise without reading an entire prologue on Hobbit lore.

Video games, however, already show and tell you the story they wanted to tell. Why do I need actors and special effects to render what a game already can? Video games are almost like interactive movies, to some extent.

 

[prowler]

reddit.com/r/gaming
take that bitch

 

[Dimensional]

Video game movies are just stupid ideas. Why do I need a movie to tell me a story I can already learn from playing the game? With books, you have to visualize yourself, and having a movie based on the book sees what you visualized or what the author intended come to life. Like Lord of the Rings is one of the largest works of fantasy in the world. The movie adaptations (which were great) were able to bring it alive and let people know about the epic franchise without reading an entire prologue on Hobbit lore.

Video games, however, already show and tell you the story they wanted to tell. Why do I need actors and special effects to render what a game already can? Video games are almost like interactive movies, to some extent.

Sadly, not all books turned into movies do well. There are some examples, but I won't name them in fear that someone will come to my house and throw bricks at the window. I don't want to get them replaced because they are scratched from the bricks. Anyways, some games can be made into movies. I for one loved the FPS sequence in DooM, which IMHO was the best part of the entire movie. It depends on the collaboration between the property owners and the studios. Seeing an Assassin's Creed movie would be nice, but as some people pointed out, why use a movie to tell the story when you get the same and then some from that game? I would think they should make the movie based on the game, but it doesn't follow the games directly, like that animated movie that will be coming with select versions of Revelations. That tells a story that you won't ever see in the games.

If they are to make a movie, they should make its story be something not from the games at all. Like what happened to Subject 16, or what Alteir did after he hid the Piece of Eden in his private library, or something else. Having small pieces from the game put in the movie works well too, because it lets the audience at least feel a bigger connection between the movie and the games. But they shouldn't make a movie based directly, completely off one of the games, or else it'll flop at the box office. Again, why watch a movie when you can get the exact same story from the game and then some. A game is more interactive than a movie after all.

 

[nando]

hope it fails.

 

[Veho]

hope it fails.

Why?

 

[Vinnymac]

I love the series and I hope Ubisoft does whatever they please to do with a movie.

 

[nando]

hope it fails.

Why?

cause i'm a hater

 

[Wintrale]

For me, it makes perfect sense. Both this and the Uncharted situation are the same - you have a series of games with a large fanbase who greatly enjoy the characters in the games. Russell wanted to turn Uncharted into some weird family drama, which is the exact opposite to what an Uncharted film should be. I actually applaud Ubisoft for putting their foot down and asserting that any Assassin's Creed film made would be made under their supervision. At least that way, they're guaranteed that the film will be a proper adaptation. All copyright owners, whether they're video game companies or novelists, should have complete control of adaptations made from their material.

 

[BrightNeko]

Because video games today totally don't have an extensive amount of Cinematography, acting direction, and a plain cinematic feel from cutscene scripting. I mean really what game today feel like a movie?

Spoiler

might have used the wrong wording and the such but you still get the point

 

[Issac]

Hey, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time wasn't that bad of a movie

As for this one... well... Good luck Sony. You WILL need it.

That's what I was going to say I actually liked Prince of Persia...

 

[purechaos996]

I would love to see an Assassins Creed Movie, I love games and I love film/movies so that would be awesome I think Ubisoft should have a lot of control over the movie or at least the script.

 

[EJames2100]

Does this mean there's gonna be no bullshit love story ?
An actual decent storyline?
Characters that somewhat resemble who they're supposedly playing(And I don't just mean looking like them) ?

 

[Nalmontes]

If they pull it off with the right amount of story and action and the epic scenes that the games provide, then it could actually work, but I'm still doubtful.

 

[mr deez]

It's an abject state of both medias affairs when game companies try to make films and film people want to make games. Embarrassing.