Assassin's Creed movie to feature characters from video game series

Through a small collection of trailers, featurettes, and E3 previews, fans of the Assassin’s Creed series have gotten to know a little bit about Aguilar, the hooded contract killer played by Michael Fassbender and at the center of the franchise’s first feature film, out Dec. 21.

In the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly — our big Fall Movie Preview — everyone looking forward to the big-screen showdown between the Assassins and the Templars can find out even more about Aguilar and his arsenal, including how production armorer Tim Wildgoose pulled from Islamic art and architecture to make the character’s costume and wrist blades as detailed as possible.

To help with the weapon design process, game developer Ubisoft sent Wildgoose a massive digital cache of game assets, most of which served as a reference for new blades, like the ones belonging to Aguilar and Maria (Ariane Labed). But in a few special cases, Wildgoose, a gamer himself, was able to forge exact replicas of weapons from previous installments to be used in the film.

“Although we’re designing the weapons ourselves,” Wildgoose said, “there are certain things you have to stick to — the way the wrist blades work. In that sense, we were going the Ubisoft reference as a design guide. At the same time, there are assassins from the games in the film as well. In some case, we could directly copy the Ubisoft weapons onto their characters.”

That’s right! While it’s been previously announced that some weapons from the games will appear as background Easter eggs, Wildgoose confirmed that some of the items created from the Ubisoft files will be used in the film by their original owners. “There’s basically a few assassins taken straight from the games, who we get to see in the films,” Wildgoose said. “We actually get to use some of the real game weapons in there.”

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Wildgoose held back when asked about which specific Assassins would appear, but he gave some hints. (For instance: Don’t expect to see Altair or Ezio.) “They’re not main characters from the games, but they’re very famous characters that the fans will probably enjoy.”

In terms of game characters appearing in the film, it was already announced that Jeremy Irons would be playing Abstergo CEO Alan Rikkin, as shadowy figure in the first Assassin’s Creed game. But until this point, it was unclear whether we could expect to see anyone outside of him from the game.

So who would you like to see make the perfectly timed parkour leap from consoles to big screen?

To continue reading more from EW’s Fall Movie Preview, pick up the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, on newsstands Friday, or buy it here – and subscribe now for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.