While this is true that they never have worked, I believe that they can work if the directors and/or writers would actually take care to be faithful to the source instead of trying to force it to accommodate moviegoer sensibilities. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a point-by-point remake of an existing story, but it does need to seem like it’s something we’d be playing if we weren’t seeing it on a movie screen.
The two Hitman movies didn’t work because they did two things wrong: 1) they tried to humanize 47, when even WoA can’t completely do that, and 2) they tried to make him an action star like Rambo rather than a creature of stealth like a slasher villain. The Assassin’s Creed movie, as another example, only really made one error, but it was the biggest error you could make with the property: they focused on the modern day protagonist rather than the ancestor’s story shown in the animus.
Turning these franchises into movies or tv shows can be done if the fundamental aspects that make them work as games are adhered to. They just rarely try to do so, because they think the audiences who go see them have the attention spans of two year olds on crack.
As a Hitman player that also happend to have a Slasher franchise as his favorite movie series (Saw), this is the most correct thing Heisenberg has ever written on the forums, 47 is really a just a greater version of Slasher killers, a one that besides the traditional uses of Knives and (in rare occasions) Guns, 47 is completely utilizing the environment to work in his needs, the target kills that can be done in a show could take the whole Slasher genre to another level.
He’s like the living embodiment of Death from the Final Destination movies. It’s an accident, technically, but also some of the most convoluted steps to get there.
Kinda true, except his kills can be easily explained in comparison to just being “weirdly extreme accidents”.
"I want to give an example to an interesting kill set that can be a great scene in a TV show:
The Meeting in Berlin - instead of being stuck in a situation where 47 is faced against a group of 5 where he is forced to get into a gun fight with the 5, the showmakers can flood the floor with water and put an exposed wire in the corner, having 47 activating the power from a far on a chair or something electrocuing them all.
Delgado getting killed by a runaway submarine, Vidal getting crushed by a grape press, and Margolis falling on Novikov during a fireworks show are all “less than plausible” accidents, in my opinion at least.
The submarine broke away from its shitty clamps because someone mistakenly forgot to turn the safety features of the engine back on before a live demonstration; Vidal erroneously believed the grape press wouldn’t activate while she was on its drain grid because of her one-percenter ignorance of such things and it squished her; and Dalia simply leaned too far over the balcony railing to look down at Novikov while shouting down at him (both Novikov’s bodyguard and the guard on the balcony near Margolis will confirm that she was shouting down at him) and misjudged how far she was leaning, lost her balance, and fell right on top of her boyfriend, who was standing directly below her. Stupider accidents than these happen all the time in real life. The words Titan submersible are a testament to that.
Not really. Its luck that Novikov stopped where he did, yes, but Dalia deliberately stepped over to the railing directly above him so she could shout down at him with the shortest possible distance between them to increase his chances of hearing her mocking him. Since 47 doesn’t go into these missions with the intent to cause an accident or an idea of how to and just makes it up on the fly, every accident he causes can be considered the same kind of luck. He saw an opening that Dalia gave him and went for it, conveniently killing two targets with one push, but they put themselves in that position and he just moved on it when he had the chance.
I’ve been thinking abut the Knives Out movies and maybe a Benoit Blanc style movie series would work well for 47.
Each film follows 47 and Diana as they take down a criminal organisation or a group of people, like the Sarajevo Six, but maybe with 3-5 missions. They can go after members of a jewel thief gang in one film, then the leadership of a drug cartel in the next, then a human trafficking gang, then a corrupt archaeological society, etc.
It’ll be a bit like a TV series, but we wouldn’t have to write an overarching plot or focus on 47 and Diana’s character development.
I think they should cast James McAvoy as the next Agent 47. He’s blue-eyed, can do an American accent, can pull off being bald and while he can act stoic, Split, among other films, shows that he does have range if he needs to impersonate someone else.
I’m no linguist, but his accent sounds more American than English. Maybe a bit of South African?
Even if we can get the look right, he’s 64 and had never done any really action-heavy roles. We don’t want him to look like DeNiro in The Irishman.
Admittedly, 47 should ideally not have to do many fight scenes, most if not all of his missions should be Silent Assassin. Maybe he could fight off rival assassins outside of missions.
This is the only way I’d accept another Hitman film or Netflix adaptation by having David Bateson playing 47. Nobody and I mean nobody can ever replicate the character like him
That is why adapting 47 to the screen (TV or movie) is never going to be a good idea. Some executive in a bad tie somewhere is going to insist that the show needs “more action” and suddenly 47 is no longer the perfect assassin - he’s the bumbling idiot who get into a fight every third scene. I don’t trust TV or movie executives to make the right decisions regarding the character at all. Look at the movies that have come out. Better to leave him in the hands of the game players.
Which is truly frustrating, because really, how difficult can it be to make a Hitman adaptation? It’s one of the easiest ones to do! The only unbelievable element would be 47 himself. Aside from him, everything else is just like the real world unless duly noted.
The only ones easier to do would be Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead.
