10) Assassin’s Creed (December 21, 2016)
Based on everything we’ve seen, Assassin’s Creed looks like it will become the best video game movie of all time essentially by default. So many similar adaptations have come from studios who don’t seem to care much about the original property, but Assassin’s Creed is the real deal.
In the director’s chair is Macbeth’s Justin Kurzel, and his film boasts a phenomenal cast of Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson and Michael K. Williams. With all that talent on board, they’d have to actively try to screw it up.
In many of the worst video game movies like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, the source material offered very little story to work with in the first place, but the premise of Assassin’s Creed is so inherently interesting. It’s a fantasy-adventure in which the hero travels back in time through the memories of his ancestors and discovers a secret society of assassins. Seriously, how cool is that?
So many historical periods can be explored in a film franchise, and in this case we’re headed back to the Spanish Inquisition so that Michael Fassbender can uncover a crazy mystery and presumably hide in bales of hay for several minutes at a time.
The first official trailer dropped earlier this week, and you can check it out for yourself above. We don’t get much in the way of plot, but the visuals are stunning and it appears Kurzel has captured the thrilling sensation of jumping across rooftops and diving from the tops of buildings that all players will be intimately familiar with.
The only concerning element here is the decision to use a Kanye West song, which is roughly as out-of-place as the music in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. But let’s all just pray this is not a representation of the actual soundtrack because otherwise it seems we’re in good hands with Assassin’s Creed.
