Movies based on video games have always been weirdly difficult for Hollywood to get right. For every moderate success, like the Resident Evil or Tomb Raider movies, you get loads of awful adaptations nobody will ever remember like Hitman or Max Payne. Even Super Mario Bros., one of the most beloved games of all time, couldn’t use a performance from Dennis Hopper to become anything better than a simulation of what’s it’s like to be on mushrooms while watching a movie about mushrooms.
Never one to learn its lesson, Hollywood has settled on Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs as the next video game to be adapted into a movie—this despite the fact that the game isn’t even out yet. This comes via Deadline, which is reporting that the rights to a live-action Watch Dogs have been picked up by New Regency and that Zombieland writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese are working on a script. New Regency is also developing movies based on two other Ubisoft titles, stealthy spy shooter Splinter Cell, which is set to star Tom Hardy, and historical stabbing-sim Assassin’s Creed, which recently got writers of its own and is set to star Michael Fassbender.
Watch Dogs—like most Ubisoft games—is about a guy who kills people and fights crime with parkour, but the twist this time around is that he’s also a super hacker who can use his cell phone to control things like traffic lights or security systems, as well as look up information about people on the street. It’s probably a lot of fun—though it’s hard to say since, again, Watch Dogs won’t even be in stores until the end of May. That’s also when we’ll find out if making a movie out of it actually seems like a good idea, despite a history of video game movies that suggests otherwise.