Ubisoft expanding from games to films with new movie studio branch

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Apparently a $335M worldwide gross for last year’s PRINCE OF PERSIA perked up quite a few ears over at Ubisoft, the studio who made the original game.

The company has now opened up a new division called Ubisoft Motion Pictures in Paris, which will be led by former EuropaCorp CEO Jean-Julien Baronnet, and whose prime directive will be adapting Ubisoft’s game franchises into movies and TV shows.

Ubisoft has also recently purchased visual effects studio Hybride Technologies and it seems they’re serious about trying to make a splash in the movie business. They have a lot of properties under their belt, as in addition to Prince of Persia, we could be seeing films or shows based on Call of Juarez, Drive, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, Heroes of Might and Magic, No More Heroes or finally Assassin’s Creed, perhaps their series most likely to get the big screen treatment.

But is Ubisoft’s in-house studio the right place for all these potential projects? On one hand it’s nice that those who made the games will be closely tied to making the films, but just because you can make a good video game, that doesn’t necessarily translate into an ability to make a movie. Also, they might have to work with much smaller budgets than most blockbusters, and the films could suffer from that.

An interesting development to be sure, and I wonder if we might see something similar from other studios in the future.