In terms of big geek properties opening before the end of the year, there are four big dogs. There’s Marvel‘s “Doctor Strange.” There’s the Harry Potter prequel “Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them.” There’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” the franchise’s first spin-off in a galaxy far, far away. And then there’s the fourth, which is presently the biggest unknown quantity, and probably the biggest gamble too.
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That film is “Assassin’s Creed,” the long-developing adaptation of the popular video game produced by and starring Michael Fassbender and helmed by his “Macbeth” director Justin Kurzel. The game is a little complicated to explain to the uninitiated, but it essentially sees a couple of sinister organizations experimenting on descendants of assassins in past epochs (such as the Crusades, Renaissance-era Venice and Victorian London) in an attempt to learn from their ancestral memories… or something.
The film sees Fassbender’s Death Row inmate saved from execution so that he can learn that his ancestor was an assassin in the era of the Spanish Inquisition, with much sword fighting and parkour to follow. Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Ariane Labed, Michael K. Williams and Brendan Gleeson also star, and we’ve got a bunch of new images from the film to share with you.
We’d love for this to be great, given how much we liked “Macbeth” last year, and the source material is potentially interesting, but we haven’t fallen for the footage we’ve seen so far. We imagine a new trailer will be dropping soon (potentially with Fox’s “Miss Peregrine” at the end of the month), so hopefully we’ll be more convinced down the line. December 21st is the date for your diaries.
