While it may remain an outlier in the genre’s recent successes, Michael Fassbender‘s infamous video game adaptation is coming to a new streaming home. Since finding early success in film with the likes of Zack Snyder’s 300 and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Fassbender has found a unique balance in his career between blockbuster productions and more prestige fare. This has, in turn, led to him garnering acclaim and major awards attention, including two Oscar nominations for 12 Years a Slave and Steve Jobs and three Golden Globe nominations.
Undeniably, though, some of Fassbender’s more iconic work has been that of franchise filmmaking, beginning with his breakthrough role as a young Erik Lensherr/Magneto in Fox’s X-Men prequels and David and Walter in Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels. However, while the early installments during his tenure in both started off on the right critical notes, both franchises saw a decline in both critical and audience reception, particularly Dark Phoenix, which served as the farewell for the Marvel franchise after the Disney-Fox merger. There is one blockbuster title in his filmography, however, that nearly left a bigger blemish on his record.
Assassin’s Creed Is Coming To Max In March
The Movie Previously Found Success On Netflix
Amid the early height of his popularity, Fassbender kept his partnership with Fox alive by starring in the Assassin’s Creed movie adaptation, which is about to jump streaming platforms. Based on Ubisoft’s game franchise of the same name, the movie starred Fassbender as a death row inmate brought in by the Abstergo Foundation to utilize the time-shifting device Animus to try and find the Apple of Eden in their hopes of enslaving humanity. Also starring Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Irons, Assassin’s Creed was a critical failure and financial underperformer upon its December 2016 release.
Now, Max has announced that Fassbender’s Assassin’s Creed will be joining the streaming platform. The video game adaptation is currently set to premiere on March 1, just over eight years after the movie first hit theaters. It also comes just over a year after the movie climbed Netflix’s viewership charts in spite of its lackluster legacy on screen.
For fans of:
- Michael Fassbender movies
- Large-scale historical dramas
- All video game adaptations, good or bad
Why You Should Watch Assassin’s Creed
Fassbender & Justin Kurzel Do Their Best To Elevate The Material
If to just look at the movie’s reception, it might be easy to initially write off Assassin’s Creed changing streaming homes as uninteresting information, but there are certainly some reasons why the movie is worth watching. The biggest is that of the movie reuniting Fassbender with director Justin Kurzel after their powerful work on Macbeth. Much like the 2015 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play, their video game adaptation did utilize its $125 million production budget to deliver some impressive production design to authentically depict its 15th-century Andalusian setting, even if it also results in an overabundance of CGI.
In addition to the actual production, the Assassin’s Creed movie certainly benefits from an all-star cast doing their very best to elevate the material. In addition to Fassbender and Cotillard, who also starred in Macbeth, Irons makes for a compelling mentor-turned-villain to the former’s protagonist, while the movie also benefits from strong supporting turns from Brendan Gleeson and Michael K. Williams as allies to Fassbender.
Related
Why Assassin’s Creed 2 Never Happened
Assassin’s Creed 2 was in the works following the first movie, and a Cold War setting was even being considered, but the sequel never materialized.
On a broader tangent, arguably the biggest reason to give the Assassin’s Creed movie a watch upon jumping to Max in March is to showcase an interest in seeing further attempts to adapt the game for the screen. Live-action, animated and anime series have all been in development at Netflix for some time, and while the movie’s success on the platform a year ago was likely a vote of confidence for the streamer to forge ahead with their development, if it is again a success on WarnerMedia’s platform, it would further boost their efforts.
What ScreenRant has said about Assassin’s Creed:
The film itself, while criticized for its overplotting and overreliance on CGI, does feature almost everything a fan of the Assassin’s Creed series of games would be looking for in a big screen property. — Most Faithful Video Game Movie Adaptations
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Assassin’s Creed Facts |
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|---|---|
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Budget |
$125 Million |
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Box Office |
$240.7 Million |
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Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score |
18% |
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Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score |
42% |
Other Video Game Adaptations To Stream On Max Now:
- The Last of Us (Max)
- Mortal Kombat (2021) (Max)
- Uncharted (Max)
- Warcraft (Max)
Source: Max
Assassin’s Creed
4/10
- Release Date
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December 21, 2016
- Runtime
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116 Minutes
- Director
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Justin Kurzel
- Writers
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Michael Lesslie, Adam Cooper, Bill Collage