Remember when Ubisoft announced they were working on a movie adaptation of hacking series Watch Dogs, before it was even released? I sure didn’t! Well, allow us both to be reminded of something from over a decade ago, because the Watch Dogs film is still apparently A Thing. It’s more of A Thing now, too, because it has actual names attached rather than just a corporation’s vague “excitement” about licensing out its IP.
Those names include a director, writer and lead star attached to the adaptation of the 2014 open-world tech-thriller (to describe it generously), which was later followed by a numbered sequel and not-quite-as-impressive-as-it-sounded-at-first London-set threequel Watch Dogs Legion, which boasted the option to take control of any NPC in the world and turn them into a hacker.
Per Deadline, French filmmaker Mathieu Turi will be taking the reins as director, having previously headed up horror movie Hostile and apparently served as an assistant director on films including Quentin Taratino’s Inglourious Basterds and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Apparently Turi is also working on a live-action television adaptation of rat-dodging stealth adventure A Plague Tale: Innocence, which I’ll confess to having missed entirely despite liking the game and its sequel.
The Watch Dogs movie screenplay will come from Christie LeBlanc, whose sole feature film credit to date is the Netflix drama Oxygen from a couple of years ago.
The lead – presumably starring as a hacker of some kind – will be Sophie Wilde, who appeared as Mia in recent horror flick Talk to Me. Talk to Me is excellent, and Wilde is excellent in it, so that at least is reason to pay attention to this.
Otherwise, we still don’t know much about how Turi, LeBlanc and their various producers and crew will actually adapt Watch Dogs for the screen. Movies about hackers using their tech prowess to take down megacorps or pursue some kind of philanthropic end aren’t exactly rare, and I don’t know if I could tell you a single thing about the Watch Dog games or baseball-capped OG protagonist Aiden Pearce – except that he can vault over the gravestone of his daughter – despite having played them.
Still, with not much to go on, maybe it’s best to reserve judgement for now. After all, The Last of Us was thoroughly brilliant and even that Fallout TV series is looking pretty good. Maybe Watch Dogs will be lining up a bunch of Oscars across its fuzzy CRT monitor this time next year.
