Ubisoft Launches Movie Division

When you’re in the news business and things move as fast as they do these days (i.e at the “speed of the Internerts”) sometimes a story will slip through the cracks. This is one of those stories.

A few days ago French video game publisher Ubisoft announced it is launching Ubisoft Motion Pictures to adapt its game franchises for film and TV. Heading up this new venture will be Jean-Julien Baronnet, former CEO of Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp., producer Didier Lupfer is in charge of production and development and Jean de Rivieres, former head of distribution at Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures France, will handle marketing and international sales.

Some of Ubisoft’s titles that could be movies include Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell. You also may recall Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was recently brought to the big screen by Jerry Bruckheimer, with Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead. Yeah, we kinda tried to forget that one too.

With this new division it will be interesting to see if the company can do a better job with turing its games into films than others have done. My guess is they probably won’t have much luck. Turning games into movies is very difficult, just ask all the people who’ve tried to do it.