Watch Dogs, a feature film adaptation of the fan-favorite Ubisoft game, has wrapped prodcution. The film stars Tom Blyth (Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes), Markella Kavenagh (Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), and Sophie Wilde (Everything Now), and has been in development since 2015. After years trapped in development hell, the movie went into active production earlier this summer with filmmaker Mathieu Turi (The Deep Dark) at the helm. Turi is directing from a screenplay by Christie LeBlanc (Oxygen) and Victoria Bata (Lessons in Chemistry). The film hails from New Regency and will likely be distributed by Disney, who absorbed 20th Century Fox’s stake in the company after their merger.
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Ubisoft made the announcement with tongue filmly in cheek, posting to social media “run film_wrapped.exe(#watchdogsmovie.mp4)…>Filming complete!” You can see it below.
The Watch Dogs franchise has a broad set of different types of gameplay, ranging from shooter levels to puzzles. The result is an immersive world where the basic “vibe” is more important than any one story. There are three games in the series — released between 2014 and 2020 — as well as a number of tie-in novels and comics. Back in 2019, there was an animated series being developed, but that never materialized.
Set in a fictionalized version of Chicago, the original game centers on Aiden Pearce, a hacker who goes on a roaring rampage of revenge after the death of his niece. That alone gives them a strong starting point in this post-John Wick world, but as noted, there are a lot of different elements of the Watch Dogs world they can fall back on.
The game was reportedly developed as part of the Driver series, but pivoted after the financial disappointment of Driver: San Francisco in 2011. It didn’t take long before talk of a film adaptation popped up, with rumors that Ubisoft was toying with a movie happening even before the first Watch Dogs was in stores.
In 2014, Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese were tapped to write a movie. That one fell apart, which was probably for the better considering it gave them time to work on a little movie called Deadpool. The Watch Dogs movie has been in some sort of development basically ever since, going through several writers and filmmakers before they found a version that New Regency was willing to throw money at.
There’s no release window for Watch Dogs yet.
