After years of development hell, Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell movie has been canceled. Originally announced back in 2012, the film would have starred Venom actor Tom Hardy as Sam Fisher, a black-ops agent who carries out missions with lethal (or non-lethal )efficiency for a secret sub-division of the NSA known as Third Echelon.
“That movie would have been awesome,” producer Basil Iwanyk said to The Direct. “Just couldn’t get it right, script-wise, budget-wise. But it was going to be great. We had a million different versions of it, but it was going to be hardcore and awesome. That’s one of the ones that got away, which is really sad.”
Details on the film were hard to come by during its development years, but in 2017, Iwanyk mentioned how it was going to be a “badass” action movie that attempted to put a fresh spin on the genre. While the Splinter Cell movie is dead, an animated adaptation from John Wick creator Derek Kolstad called Splinter Cell: Deathwatch is on the way. Liev Schrieber voices Fisher in this Netflix series, but it doesn’t have a confirmed release date locked in yet.
On the video game side, a remake of the first Splinter Cell game is also in production, but Ubisoft has been keeping very quiet on its progress lately. The last solid piece of information came in 2022, when Ubisoft celebrated the 20th anniversary of Splinter Cell by revealing some of the new tech being used to develop the remake.
Meanwhile, filming on Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs recently wrapped up, and the movie is now in post-production. Hunger Games actor Tom Blyth plays one of the lead roles opposite Talk to Me’s Sophia Wilde.