The upcoming Assassin's Creed movie has been slowly gathering steam for a good long while now, but as of today, Ubisoft has announced that the film has officially begun production, and has a release date to boot, December 21, 2016. Ubisoft has an unprecedented level of influence over the film for a video game studio, and is actually co-publishing the movie with New Regency. It's been considered by many fans to be one of the best new hopes for creating a video game-based film that might actually turn out to be high quality, first given Ubisoft's involvement, and second, based on the fact that the esteemed Michael Fassbender has been attached to the project for a while now. The actor will be playing both the present day lead, and his Assassin ancestor in the genetic flashbacks which will assuredly make up most of the film. Also this week it was announced that the cast has expanded to include Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard in an unspecified role, lending further credence to the film's potential quality.

In 2015, director Justin Kurzel and actors Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard teamed for a prestigious cinematic adaptation, a bloody, mad take on "Macbeth." Taking on the popular video game "Assassin's Creed" seems like quite the left turn, and while the results aren't as striking as the previous outing -- it's pretty uneven -- the film is thoroughly stamped with Kurzel's unique visual style, which makes for an exciting, if strange ride. There is a complicated and deep mythology behind the game, and the film follows it mostly faithfully. Callum Lynch (Fassbender) is a death row inmate with a violent childhood. He is put to death by lethal injection, but wakes up in a clinic at the shadowy Abstergo corporation.

The first trailer for December's Assassin's Creed dropped last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Based on Ubisoft's long running videogame franchise, the film stars Michael Fassbender as a former death row inmate forced to step into the shoes of an ancestor of his who lived during the Spanish Inquisition. This all probably makes a lot of sense to you if you've played any one of the eleventeen Assassin's Creed videogames published by Ubisoft over the last decade. If not, you're likely left with a lot of questions as to what exactly is going on here. Fortunately, we have sunk hundreds of hours into various Assassin's Creed games and feel qualified to answer said queries.

Fans of the "Assassin's Creed" video game series got a look Wednesday at the first trailer for 20th Century Fox's upcoming film adaptation starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Fassbender ("X-Men: Apocalypse") plays Callum Lynch, a violent man who finds himself recruited by a corporation and dispatched through ancestral memory as a highly trained killing machine. The film is the latest iteration of the "Assassin's Creed" mythos, which has sold over 80 million copies of its games, as well as several spinoff comics and novels. Joining Fassbender in the cast of the 150-million adaptation are Academy Award winners Cotillard ("La Vie en Rose") and Jeremy Irons ("Reversal of Fortune") as Justin Kurzel, who worked with both Fassbender and Cotillard in his 2015 "Macbeth." While it's clear a large portion of that budget is dedicated to the special effects required to render a live-action version of a video game, it's unclear whether those moments will translate to anything approaching emotional resonance.

It's a phrase likely to strike fear and dread into the heart of most gamers, and indeed most moviegoers. All of these classic, hugely acclaimed video games have been thrust onto the big screen (or the straight-to-DVD shelves) by people whose knowledge of the source materials seems to have been passing at best. The results have been ... horrible. Assassin's Creed, we are being told, is a different story. Produced by Ubisoft, the company that developed and published the bestselling games, it has actual star actors (Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons) and a talented director in the form of Justin Kurzel, who made the award-winning Snowtown and helmed Fassbender's gritty Macbeth movie.

Along with Duncan Jones's Warcraft it's been billed as the video game movie that might just make us forget all about the cinematic crimes of Uwe Boll and his ilk, that can induce glorious amnesia for those struggling to wipe clean memories of Prince of Persia, Hitman or Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. The omens so far are good. Assassin's Creed comes from the team behind last year's blistering new take on Macbeth, with director Justin Kurzel bringing back his stars Michael Fassbender (also a hands-on producer) and Marion Cotillard. Here are five takeaways from the first trailer for the film. How strange that the cute copine from France's hit Taxi comedies has developed into one of the most sublime screen beauties of modern Hollywood.