Splinter Cell franchise producer Basil Iwanyk recently spoke about the direction the film adaptation will be heading during an interview with Collider.
“The challenge of making Splinter Cell interesting was we didn’t have this IP with a very specific backstory. That allowed us to make up our own world and really augment and fill out the characters. I don’t think one applies to the other because I don’t think our movie will feel like a movie that came out of a video game, I think it’ll feel like a badass, Tom Hardy action movie, which is what we wanted.”
“We’re definitely going to make it a hard PG-13. No, it’s not going to be like John Wick, but it’s going to be badass. The good and the bad news is that, obviously, the Bond movies have had a resurgence and the Jason Bourne movies are the Jason Bourne movies, so we’re trying to stay away from those movies in terms of tone, in terms of bad guys, in terms of settings. What’s a world that we haven’t seen yet? What’s an area of the world and a conflict that we haven’t really touched upon in movies in a long time, to make it feel fresh?”
Ubisoft launched Ubisoft Motion Pictures in 2011 and announced big screen adaptations of Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon and Watch Dogs. Assassin’s Creed, their first movie, was a box office and critical failure when it opened this past December.