I’m not quite sure who among us is eagerly awaiting the big screen adaptation of Ubisoft’s open world hack-a-thon Watch Dogs. Even me, even considering I liked the first Watch Dogs and liked the third Watch Dogs and have a few pleasant if foggy memories of the second Watch Dogs. I’m sure I’ll watch the movie out of curiosity (or because my boss makes me review it) but it does feel like it’s arriving about a decade too late.
That’s because it’s arriving about a decade too late. The Watch Dogs movie was announced back in 2013, the same year as the Harlem Shake, and Beyonce lip-syncing at Obama’s first inauguration, and the Game of Thrones show’s Red Wedding. That’s how damn long ago this movie was announced.
More perspective: 2013 was the year Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag came out. Ubisoft has released eight more Assassin’s Creed games since the Watch Dogs movie was greenlit.
So, yeah, it took quite a while to get rolling, but last year we got confirmation that filming was actually underway, and we’ve now gotten confirmation that filming has wrapped (at least mostly) and we may actually get to see this gosh darn movie at some point before we’re planted.
Speaking to Screen Rant while promoting another film, actor Tom Blyth (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) was asked about the Watch Dogs film, in which he plays a (currently unnamed) role.
“Yeah, it’s going to be cool. We just went back and did reshoots on it recently and made it even better,” Blyth told Screen Rant. “It’s not the game. It is very different. They’ve done an amazing job of making… I don’t want to spoil too much. I’m trying to pick my words carefully, but they’ve done an amazing job of making the game into a film.”
Blyth continued: “It doesn’t feel like they’ve tried to copy and paste the game onto the screen. It feels like its own thing, and it feels like the beginning of a world-building exercise.”
A bit to unpack there. Reshoots mean the production was wrapped at one point, but it’s impossible to say why more filming had to be done—and it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything wrong with the project. My understanding is that reshoots are pretty common during post-production.
It is interesting that Blythe said the film is “not the game” and that it “feels like its own thing,” though. To me, that says this adaptation is gonna be heavy on the adaptation, if you know what I mean. I’m open to the movie straying far from the games—I think a bit too much fan service can be a terrible thing in movies—but I also do want to see a whole bunch of game stuff in this movie, too. If Blythe doesn’t use his phone to hijack self-driving cars and steer them into fire hydrants and telephone poles just for funsies, I’m going to be severely disappointed.
Hopefully we’ll find out more about the Watch Dogs movie in the next few months instead of having to wait, like another 13 years. It’s not like the themes of an oppressive and invasive government will ever go out of style, but the further in time we get from the games (the most recent one, Watch Dogs: Legion was way back in 2020), the less connection a movie might have with the people who played them.
