Netflix has confirmed that its Assassin’s Creed adaptation will not be retelling the story of Ezio Auditore, Altair, or any other character from the games. Instead, the show will be set in ancient Rome, approximately 1,400 years before the Italian Renaissance setting of Assassin’s Creed 2, making it one of the earliest periods yet explored in the franchise’s lore. It is an entirely original story within the Assassin’s Creed universe.
Some fans will push back on this. The Brotherhood era, the Templars vs Assassins conflict as Ezio lived it, the cities of Florence and Venice as Ubisoft rendered them, all of that has a genuine following who would love to see it brought to screen. That’s understandable. But adapting the games directly would have been a mistake.
The Assassin’s Creed lore is, frankly, a mess to navigate if you are not already deep into it. The Animus, the Pieces of Eden, the Isu civilisation, the modern-day Abstergo plotline that quietly took over every mainline game through the PS3 era, it requires a substantial investment to follow. A show that tried to serve existing fans first would confuse everyone else and probably frustrate the fans too by inevitably simplifying things they care about.
An original story set in ancient Rome sidesteps all of that. It can introduce the Assassin Brotherhood at its roots, establish the core conflict between order and freedom on which the whole franchise rests, and do it without carrying the baggage of twenty-odd games’ worth of established canon.
It is essentially the approach that saved The Last of Us and Fallout as adaptations. The Last of Us stayed close to the game’s story but treated it as source material rather than a script. Fallout took even more liberties, building something that felt like the games without being beholden to any one of them. Both worked because the showrunners understood what made those worlds compelling and built outward from that, rather than inward from existing plot points.
Assassin’s Creed has always been at its best when it commits to a time and place and explores it with genuine curiosity. Ancient Rome is a rich canvas. If the writers understand that the setting is the point, this has a real chance.