Ubisoft Returns To the Movies With a Watch Dogs Adaptation

Almost a decade ago, Ubisot tried to make a new for itself as a movie company by bringing its Assassin’s Creed franchise to the big screen. That didn’t go particularly well, and though we got the fairly solid Werewolves Within a few years later, the French publisher has (sort of) pivoted to TV. But Ubisoft’s hoping to make cinematic lightning strike thrice, this time with the Watch Dogs series.

Per Deadline, a feature film is in the works from New Regency. It’s already locked down a potential lead in Sophie Wilde, who headlined last year’s breakout horror flick Talk to Me from A24. Plot details are currently under wraps, but it’ll be working from a script by Christie Leblanc (Oxygen) and directed by The Dark Deep’s Mathieu Turi. (According to the outlet, Turi’s also been tapped to direct a film adaptation as Asobo’s A Plague Tale: Innocence.)

The Watch Dogs games are tech thrillers set within the present day, and whose entire gimmick revolves around hackers manipulating the computing network of whatever city they’re in through their phone (or a computer). The first game caught everyone’s attention with its gameplay reveal at E3 2012, which teased a promising new future for open world games. That didn’t entirely end up being the case; the 2014 title has its fans, but it didn’t cash all of the checks that demo had written. 2016’s Watch Dogs 2 took things west from Chicago to San Francisco with a new cast of characters and a more sunny disposition, to the appreciation of many; 2020’s Watch Dogs Legion let players play as effectively everyone in London to form a resistance movement and go up against the city’s authoritarian regime.

There hasn’t been a new Watch Dogs entry since Legion, and it’s not clear if Ubisoft has any interest in continuing the franchise. Last year’s Captain Laserhawk show featured characters from that series as part of a shared Ubisoft universe, but that’s not meant to be taken as hard canon. If the developer has any intent of doing synergy with this eventual new movie—even if it’s as simple as a current-gen remake of the original Watch Dogs—that probably won’t be talked about until the film is actually made and close to release.

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