Assassin's Creed
Four years after it was first announced, the movie based on the hit video game, Assassin's Creed, finally starts filming this September.
German-Irish actor Michael Fassbender will star in the movie. French actress and environmental activist Marion Cotillard will co-star while the director will be Justin Kurzel, an Australian film director and screenwriter whose movie, Macbeth, was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival from May 13 to 24.
Fassbender and Cotillard are the main actors in Macbeth, which was directed by Kurzel, so Assassin's Creed might well be called Macbeth's Creed.
According to rumors, Fassbender will either play bartender Desmond Miles, a descendant of an Assassins clan tasked with finding the "Pieces of Eden" or Spanish Assassin Aguilar de Agarorobo and his modern day descendant, Michael Lynch (a convicted felon), being used by the Templars as they battle the Assassins. The film will apparently be set during the Spanish Inquisition.
Fassbender is best known for playing the arch villain Magneto in X-Men: First Class (2011) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), and slave owner Edwin Epps in the film, 12 Years a Slave that won the Academy Award as Best Picture in 2013.
He earlier said the film will try to remain faithful to the game but opened the door to some changes, saying they were "approaching it as a feature film, as opposed to approaching it as a video game".
"You know, we absolutely want to respect the game", he said.
"There's so much cool stuff in the game that we're actually spoiled for choice in terms of what we can use and what we can't, but we also want to bring new elements to it and perhaps our own version of things that already exist in the game.
Principal photography will start this September with the movie release set for Dec. 21, 2016. Fassbender addressed the movie's over long gestation period saying:
"You say it's a long time but what I've found -- it's all new to me but starting to develop scripts and work on them, they take time. It just takes time to get a good story together and we really want to do it right. It's exciting. It's going to start this year; we'll be filming in September.
"There are so many elements to it, so trying to translate that to an audience, you have to pick key things," he said.
"So yes, that is part of it, getting through the density of it and paring down and engaging a simple story."
The Assassin's Creed movie is being produced by New Regency and 20th Century Fox, said Game Spot.
