Over the years, video game to film adaptations have been wrought with miscues, misdirection and hamstrung plots. Rarely will someone make the argument that these films have to closely followed their source material. More often well-liked characters, plot points and narrative elements are disregarded in a quest to create another summer action blockbuster.
Video game publisher Ubisoft is looking to change the trend when several of its intellectual properties crossover to the silver screen. The company is taking a more direct approach and is more enthusiastically involved with the film making process.
In a recent interview The Los Angeles Times, Jean-Julien Baronnet, the chief executive of Ubisoft Motion Pictures unit, explained how the company is involved with casting actors, the script and filmmaking decisions.
"If you look at past adaptations of games to movies, none were done by an integrated gaming company that put a movie structure inside of itself," Baronnet told The L.A. Times. "We're not here to just license and we're not here to produce big movies ourselves. We are really in the middle of it."
The French gaming company has two adaptation in the early stages of production- "Splinter Cell" starring Tom Hardy and "Assassin's Creed" featuring Michael Fassbender. Baronnet wants to keep these adaptations as true to the source material as possible.
"With so much at stake, it's important we don't give up the DNA of the game, the fundamental pillars," Baronnet told The L.A. Times.
According to Baronnet, Ubisoft doesn't want to make an average movie based on its properties. The company wants to do something that it believes has never been done before, the creation of an adaptation that appease both fans of the game and moviegoers.
"We don't want to make an average movie," Baronnet said. "We want to make a movie that will serve the brand and make happy the gamers and also the non-gamers. I think it has never been done before, but we can build this bridge."
