Ubisoft Planning GHOST RECON Movie!
Video Game developer Ubisoft is hitting Hollywood hard. Movies have recently been announced for Assassins Creed with Michael Fassbender, and Splinter Cell with Tom Hardy. It has now been revealed that they are prepping to bring Ghost Recon to the big screen as well! According to LA Times, Jean-Julien Baronnet, chief executive of Ubisoft films, is putting together a pitch for a big screen adaptation of Ghost Recon which revolves around a special operations military squad.
For some reason Hollywood just hasn't been able to get video game movies right, but it looks like Ubisoft is going to be the first video game company to hit Hollywood hard, and it seems like they're on track to doing it right. Ubisoft will remain heavily involved throughout the whole film production process. They will also keep creative control on their properties, which I think is extremely important to the fans. Baronnet had this to say in an interview,
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. 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... With so much at stake, it's important we don't give up the DNA of the game, the fundamental pillars. We don't want to make an average movie. 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.
Ubisoft has an internal staff of writers, and by the time they take these film projects to studios they already have a script treatment and a star attached to it. According to New Regency Chief Executive Brad Weston, the scripts are currently being written for Assassins Creed and Splinter Cell and they are looking to bring on a couple of directors to take them on. Weston went on to say,
We're looking to bring both an independent and studio mentality to these movies, and both these actors speak to that... Ubisoft did something very intelligent in bringing people from the film industry who speak the same language that we do. We're working in partnership versus [the more standard method of] us doing the work and then turning it in for approval.
I have a feeling that Ubisoft and New Regency are going to make beautiful video game movies together. I'm extremely excited about what they are going to give the fans, and they will probably be the team that ends up breaking the video game movie curse and showing the rest of Hollywood that awesome video game movies can be made, and be successful.
On top of Ghost Recon, it was also revealed that Ubisoft is producing a cartoon series based on the Rabbids games.