Netflix has set hearts racing across the videogaming world by announcing that it's developing a live-action TV show based on the long-running and hugely popular Assassin's Creed series. #
A single tweet contains all the details so far available about the show, which we'd presume is at a fairly early stage of development, but it does confirm that Ubisoft's Jason Altman and Danielle Kreinik will be on board as executive producers.
Of course, this has immediately opened the floodgates on an absolute torrent of questions and hypotheticals about exactly how Netflix will approach the show - Assassin's Creed has a wide range of storylines and settings to call upon already, from renaissance Italy to Victorian London, Cleopatra's Egypt to revolutionary France and ancient Greece, all of them with distinct protagonists.
That's before you get to the sometimes baffling overarching narrative involving Abstergo, DNA-based memory exploration and futuristic covert wars between Assassins and Templars. There's a lot to get through, and dare we say it perhaps some slight simplifying to be done, too.
For our money, though, we think Ezio Auditore's tale of ambition in Italy is the most likely starting point - the games starring Ezio were the ones that really exploded Assassin's Creed into a global mega-franchise in gaming, and they also have potentially the most straightforward stories to adapt, along with a more easily-realised setting.
Still, for now we'll just have to wait to find out more, like everyone else. Based on the big success of The Witcher, though, which draws on both the videogames of the same name and their source books, you'd imagine Assassin's Creed should be a decent hit on the small screen, erasing the lacklustre performance of the Michael Fassbender film from a few years back.