While Ubisoft’sAssassin’s Creedadaptation didn’t makean eagle divea big splash at the domestic box office, a relatively strong international performance kept theMichael Fassbender-starrer from being a write-off and turned it into a decent earner. The film continues its rollout in China and Japan in February and March respectively, but Ubisoft isn’t waiting on the final numbers to move ahead with their next video game adaptation:Splinter Cell.
TheTom Clancy-inspired/endorsed video game franchise is already set up to starTom Hardyin the lead, and will be produced in part byBasil Iwanyk. Our own Steve Weintraub had a chance to sit down with Iwanyk for his part inJohn Wick: Chapter 2and managed to get some timely updates on the state of the stealth-action movie. The good news for fans is that this thing is still a go, even though we haven’t heard any news on its progressin some time; the bad news is that I’m not sure just how much theSplinter Cellmovie will resemble its video game namesake.
First up, it looks likeSplinter Cellis waiting for script approval and the go-ahead from Hardy before entering into production:
Collider: Are you still producingSplinter Cell?
Basil Iwanyk: I am. 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 [Tom] 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.
And as I previously mentioned, the box office performance of earlier video game adaptations aren’t a big concern for this adaptation, as far as Iwanyk is concerned:
Does the financial box office ofAssassin’s Creedplay intoSplinter Cellor are these separate things?
Iwanyk: They’re separate kind of things. The story of the financial success ofAssassin’s Creedis yet to be told because we do live in an international world; it’s still rolling out.Assassin’s Creedhad a very specific world to it and a very specific storyline, character, all that stuff.Splinter Cellreally is a first-person shooter game. And so the challenge of makingSplinter Cellinteresting 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.
Here’s where I’ll have to disagree a little bit, and I’m assuming thatSplinter Cellfans will, too. The series centers onSam Fisher, a character with a well-established background, personality, physical appearance, and relationships, all set in a realistic modern world with very real and complex problems. In short, unless the movie is going completely off-book, there’s enough existing IP here to draw from. That being said, Tom Hardy could make a very convincing Sam Fisher:
Tom Hardy has talked about, for years now,Splinter Cell, and I think he’s a gamer.
Iwanyk: He is a gamer. He’s also a guy who has a lot of friends in that world, not the gaming world but the Special Ops world. He wants to play this character really, really badly. That’s what makes it exciting for all of us because Tom playing this character is an event.
Splinter Cell, the first-person shooter series that emphasizes stealth operations but also relies on a good amount of “neutralizing the bad guys”, is a military-themed action franchise. It’s got that in common withThe Hurt Locker,Argo,Zero Dark Thirty, andLone Survivor, to draw from recent cinematic history. What do those films have thatSplinter Cellprobably won’t? An R rating:
Do you envision this as an R-rated kind of thing?
Iwanyk: No, but we’re definitely going to make it a hard PG-13. No, it’s not going to be like[John] Wick, but it’s going to be badass.
Did you guys look at a real-world event to go with or what are you digging towards for this story?
Iwanyk: It’s more of what we’re digging away from. The good and the bad news is that, obviously, the Bond movies have had a resurgence and the Jason Bourne movies are the Jason Bourne movies, so we’re trying to stay away from those movies in terms of tone, in terms of bad guys, in terms of settings. What’s a world that we haven’t seen yet? What’s an area of the world and a conflict that we haven’t really touched upon in movies in a long time, to make it feel fresh?
A good question. Hopefully we get to find out the answer soon!
