Back in May, Ubisoft announced the formation of their own movie prodution house, Ubisoft Motion Pictures. With video games slated to become the next big Hollywood movie genre for tentpole films, this was no surprise, especially when looking at Ubisoft's array of intellectual properties.

Shortly thereafter, they confirmed the studio and plans to adapt the Assassin's Creed, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell franchises into feature films. The latest news has one of these already close to finalizing a deal with a studio to become a reality.

While some may understandably balk at the idea of turning these high quality video games into feature films, due the industry trend of poor, brand-tarnishing adaptations, Ubisoft, like many other publishers as of late, plans to keep a tight grip on the reins of these projects in terms of creative control. The goal afterall, is to expand and grow the franchises to allow the games to reach an even larger audience, while also bringing in more revenue streams.

While we saw Disney do a mediocre job with Prince of Persia last year, Sony looks to have a chance to try with the franchise that practically replaced it, Assassin's Creed.

Variety is reporting that Sony Pictures is near to closing a deal with Ubisoft Motion Pictures to distribute and likely co-finance the production of a big budget Assassin's Creed movie. Sony of course, are also working on adaptations of Uncharted - a project they almost destroyed before replacing the director and removing star-to-be Mark Wahlberg - and inFamous, a film which is seemingly stuck in indefinitely in the scripting stages.

With Ubisoft weeks away from the release of the franchise's fourth installment, Assassin's Creed Revelations with another follow-up likely coming next year to introduce a new character and locale to the series, it's prime time for the developer and publisher to begin work on the film side. Let's hope they get the right people involved and do the series right.

From the costume designs to how insanely epic the gameplay trailers and cinematic videos (watch the Assassin's Creed Revelations E3 trailer to see what we mean) for the series have been, Assassin's Creed has very high potential to do incredible things as a film franchise.

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Source: Variety