Ubisoft are not allowing the critical disappointment that was Assassin's Creed to get in their way of plans to adapt another video game, this time courtesy of Splinter Cell. Although the Michael Fassbender flick gave the production company a decent return at the box office on their investment, it did not have the fans of the game nor the general moviegoer excited enough to enjoy the experience.
Producer Basil Iwanyk outlined to Collider that Englishman Tom Hardy is already a gamer and loves Splinter Cell. A transition that should be easier for The Dark Knight Rises and Mad Max: Fury Road star. The game's popularity has never been under question and while the news on the adaptation has been slow coming, the good news is that moves are underway to make it a reality.
SC Need A Script and Hardy Signature First
Pressed by the publication over the stalling on the project, Iwanyk explained that it is just a matter of Hardy and the team to come to the negotiating table and make a deal happen.
"I am. We’ve got a script," replied the producer. "It’s a little long, but it’s the best script we’ve had. Now that I’m back from Mexico City, we’re going in there to figure out how to cut some pages and give it to (Tom) Hardy. This draft kind of addressed Tom’s notes. We’re going to give it to Hardy in the next couple of weeks and hopefully try to get it done this year."
Not wanting to talk down Assassin's Creed or link the two together, Iwanyk believes that history will reflect kinder on that film than it is being given credit for right now.
"They’re separate kind of things," he starts. "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."
Tom Knows The World of the Special Ops
Not only does Hardy know the material of the character Sam Fisher in the first person shooter game, but he has personal connections with real life special operatives that will give him a grounding in the world.
"He is a gamer," remarked Iwanyk. "He’s also a guy who has a lot of friends in that world, not the gaming world but the Special Ops world. He wants to play this character really, really badly. That’s what makes it exciting for all of us because Tom playing this character is an event."
In a disappointing admission, the producer said it will not be R rated. "No, but 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." But Iwanyk does want the story to be original and avoid action genre cliches like other productions have fallen into.
"It’s more of what we’re digging away from. 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?"
Source: Collider
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