The New Regency-produced film adaptation of Ubisoft’s “Watch Dogs” video game franchise wrapped back in late 2024, yet there’s still no word on a release date as yet.
The lead stars of the film include a trio of relatively recent breakouts – “Talk to Me” lead Sophie Wilde, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” actress Markella Kavenagh, and “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” lead Tom Blyth.
Blyth is currently out promoting his prison drama “Wasteman” and was asked by Screen Rant about how the film was progressing. He says he’s only “seen little bits in ADR” and so far they “look great,” and can’t wait to “see the finished thing”.
The game itself is a little on the older side, the first title coming out in 2014 at a time quite different to today in terms of surveillance, privacy and technology. Blyth says the writers have taken that into account:
“I think the way they wrote that script…even though I’m not particularly a gamer myself, I knew the games. They took it, and they made it about the world we live in today. I will say that I do think that the film really tears apart this world we live in today, which is this online [setting], the dangers of everything being interconnected and online in the way that the games do. Yeah, that was a vague answer, but that’s all I can say.”
The games unfold in fictionalised versions of real-life modern-day cities, which are all run by ctOS, software which offers centralised control over all major infrastructure systems across entire cities, including subway lines, electricity grids, surveillance cameras and traffic control systems.
The games follow hacker protagonists caught up in the criminal underworlds of their respective cities who are able to use their phones as a means to both lift people’s personal data and manipulate the environment around them, from door locks to street lights.
It was already known that the film would be an original story set within the same universe, rather than a direct adaptation of a specific game. Mathieu Turi helms the film while Christie LeBlanc and Victoria Bata penned the script.
