The scramble to turn every videogame into a movie is now in full swing, and another film adaptation has just been announced: this time it's Riders Republic, Ubisoft's 2021 open world extreme sports sandbox. The game didn't have much of a plot beyond competing in biking, skiing, snowboarding, and wingsuiting races and competitions, so if Ubisoft thinks they can turn that into a movie…
Yeah, I'd probably watch it. Wouldn't you watch it? I like seeing people do bike flips and ski jumps and snowboard… things. Who doesn't love seeing someone jump off a cliff in a wingsuit? It's rad.
The pair also directed 2022's Batgirl, starring Leslie Grace, Brendan Fraser, J.K. Simmons, and Michael Keaton—which I didn't even get H25 the chance to not see because Warner Bros decided it was more profitable to write the film off as a tax break than release it. Brutal. Writing Riders Republic is screenwriter Noé Debré who won a Palme d'Or for the French film Dheepan (didn't see it) in 2015.
The track record for Ubisoft film adaptations is… mixed, I guess you'd say. At one end of the scale is Uwe Boll's notoriously stinky Far Cry film from 2008, in the "so-so" region you've got some bland attempts at adaptations like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and 2016's Assassin's Creed. The best, I think, is horror comedy Werewolves Within, based on the social deduction VR game published by Ubisoft.
