Ubisoft finally managed to release their Assassin’s Creed movie this past December, but their Splinter Cell movie has been sitting in development hell for quite a long while now. That said, the project still exists, and Collider spoke with producer Basil Iwanyk about it and things got…a little weird.
The strangest part comes when Iwanyk is asked about the difference between Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell, and if the financials of the former will affect how the latter moves forward.
They’re separate kind of things. The story of the financial success of Assassin’s Creed is yet to be told because we do live in an international world; it’s still rolling out. Assassin’s Creed had a very specific world to it and a very specific storyline, character, all that stuff. Splinter Cell really is a first-person shooter game. And so 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, a few things here:
- Splinter Cell is not a first person shooter
- Splinter Cell certainly does have a specific story attached to both it and Sam Fisher across its various installments
- This very much seems like they just wanted to make a cool action movie with Tom Hardy and are content simply slapping the Splinter Cell/Tom Clancy badge on the final product
He’s talking about how this is different than Assassin’s Creed, but in a weird way, that movie did almost the same thing.
Yes, the Assassin’s Creed movie had Assassins and Templar and the Animus and Abstergo, but it had no characters from the games, meaning pretty much everyone was invented from scratch, using only the base framework of the series as inspiration. And one of the main problems with the film was that for some reason it reversed the storytelling mechanic of the games. The movie spent almost all its time in the present day, while only jumping into the past for two-to-three brief actions sequences.
From the looks of these Splinter Cell comments, it seems like that movie is going to get even further away from the games to the point where it really doesn’t even care about them at all. Yes, Tom Hardy’s character will be named Sam Fisher and there will be glowing night vision goggles and he will probably drop down from the ceiling at one point. But everything else will just be turned into whatever action story they want to make.
I understand why this can work sometimes, as often the exact stories found in games do not really lend themselves to translation in films, which we’ve seen time and time again. But I can’t imagine that Splinter Cell is going to turn into something terribly good, given how long the film has been stewing, and let’s be honest, Splinter Cell isn’t exactly the hottest gaming property around these days either.
I’m a lot more interested to see how The Division movie turns out, which already has a director and all-star cast attached to it (Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Chastain), along with arguably better source material to work with. Splinter Cell has already lost one director, the state of the script is unknown, and the only thing it seems to have left is Tom Hardy. And even that might not be enough to keep it together/make it worthwhile if it is ever actually made.
I admire Ubisoft’s determination in sprinting forward to really try and make the whole video game movie thing happen. Despite the many flaws of Assassin’s Creed, it was in many ways a beautiful film, and I would argue the best game-to-movie adaptation so far, however low that bar might be set. But Splinter Cell trying to run away from both the game it’s based on, and really the very concept of being a video game adaptation altogether does not inspire much confidence, and I hope The Division doesn’t go down that same path.
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