Production has begun on a film adaptation of the cybercrime videogame series Watch Dogs – over a decade after it was first announced.
After more than a decade in development, shooting has finally begun on Watch Dogs, the film adaptation of Ubisoft’s series of open-world hacking videogames.
The announcement comes directly from Ubisoft itself, which broke the news on X/Twitter/Muskbook with a photograph of a clapperboard and the caption ‘Lights_Camera_Action.exe’.
Watch Dogs was first announced in 2013, before the first game in the series had even been released. It was a period of excitement for Ubisoft, since it had just set up its own film division and had grand plans of making movies out of several of its properties.
There was even talk of Tom Hardy starring in a Splinter Cell movie. Enthusiasm began to cool when Ubisoft Motion Pictures put out its Assassin’s Creed film in 2016 and critics treated it with scorn (one writer summed it up as Dan Brown with parkour).
Wheels on the Watch Dogs cart have begun to turn more freely in recent months, however, with reports emerging in March that Sophie Wilde, the breakout star of Australian horror Talk To Me, is taking the lead in Ubisoft’s movie. The director and writer’s names were also floated at the same time – calling the shots is French filmmaker Mathieu Turi, whose movies include 2017’s Hostile and 2023’s Black Faces.
The script, meanwhile, is by Christie Le Blanc, who previously wrote the Netflix sci-fi thriller Oxygen, directed by Alexandre Aja.
Neither Ubisoft nor New Regency, the production company actually making the movie, have revealed anything about its plot. The games have always been urban tech thrillers, essentially, with their protagonists using their hacking skills to exact revenge or to prevent evil tech companies from turning our cities into surveillance dystopias.
Weirdly, the videogame franchise itself doesn’t seem to be in particularly good health. A report emerged in April that, following the release of Watch Dogs: Legion in 2020, Ubisoft was no longer interested in continuing the series. Relatively slow sales are reportedly behind the decision.
More on the Watch Dogs film as we get it.
