Despite the fact that Assassin's Creed is on track to lose a huge amount of money, Hollywood doesn't seem content to give up on videogame adaptations just yet.

If anything, they're doubling down and the next major videogame to get a film is still happening, according to one of the producers attached to it. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell franchise has been a hot property for Ubisoft for a number of years and an adaptation of it has been attempted several times over the years.

The last we heard was that Tom Hardy was all set to take it on, when he decided to chuck it and do The Revenant with Leonardo DiCaprio instead. The rumour going around was that Hardy wasn't happy with the script and the lack of a director with a clear vision of how the film would look was more than a little disconcerting.

As it stands, there is still no director announced for the film - but it appears as though the whole thing is still progressing, even though Assassin's Creed has just about barely its money back and vastly underperformed from what it was expected. According to producer Basil Iwaynk, who spoke to Collider recently, money doesn't come into it for Splinter Cell or Assassin's Creed.

"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."

That's a fair point, but the fact remains that there hasn't yet been a decent film-to-videogame adaptation and there's been more than a few decent attempts. Warcraft and Assassin's Creed were supposed to break through and start the next wave of blockbusters, but it could yet happen with Splinter Cell.

For now, the film is still at the script stages, but producer Basil Iwaynk reiterated that Hardy is still very much interested in the film and wants to make it happen.

"We’ve got a script. 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 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."

Considering it's been a few years since Splinter Cell was released, don't hold your breath on this one.

 

Via Collider