Filming on the New Regency-produced film adaptation of Ubisoft’s “Watch Dogs” video game franchise wrapped a year ago this month, but so far there’s still no sign of the film.
“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” breakout Tom Blyth, along with Aussie actresses Sophie Wilde (“Talk to Me”) and Markella Kavenagh (“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”) star in the film which by all accounts had a smooth production and was shot during the third quarter of 2024.
The games unfold in fictionalized 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 phone 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 the film would be an original story set within the same universe, rather than a direct adaptation of a specific game. Now, out promoting his new film “Plainclothes,” Blyth reveals to Screen Rant that the delay seems to be due to reshoots and some potentially big deviations from the source material:
“Yeah, it’s going to be cool. We just went back and did reshoots and made it even better. It’s cool. Sophie Wilde’s amazing. It’s not the game. It’s very different. They’ve done an amazing job of making the game into a film. It feels very film. It doesn’t feel like they’ve tried to copy and paste the game onto the screen. It feels like it’s own thing, and also feels like the beginning of a world-building exercise.”
French genre filmmaker Mathieu Turi directs from a script by Christie LeBlanc and Victoria Bata. No release date for the film has been set as yet.
