After a Flop Film, Assassin's Creed Tries Theater

In 2016, Ubisoft put Michael Fassbender in a hood, spent roughly $125 million on a movie, and watched it underperform at the box office hard enough to kill any sequel talk within weeks. A decade later, the publisher is trying again to push Assassin's Creed beyond the console, but this time the pitch is stranger: a live stage show featuring parkour, acrobatics, and choreographed sword fights.

The official Assassin's Creed account announced Heredis on May 5, describing it as "an original live show" blending "acrobatics, parkour, theatre, and history into a powerful new stage experience." The production premieres December 3 in Montreal before moving to Paris on January 21, 2027. Tickets are already on sale. The show will be performed in French, with no word yet on whether it will travel to English-speaking markets.

Heredis follows a new character named Naël, who receives a mysterious letter on his 25th birthday that leads him into something called the HEREDIS program. According to the show's official website, the program sends Naël back through different historical eras as he searches for his missing father. like the Animus with a fresh coat of paint, it almost certainly is, though neither Abstergo nor the Animus are mentioned by name. Ubisoft is framing this as a standalone story "inspired by the world and themes of the franchise" that doesn't require any prior knowledge of the games, while promising long-time fans will spot plenty of references.

I'll be honest: my first reaction was to laugh. A stage show is such a left-field move for a franchise that's struggled to land anything outside of its core medium. But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes as a low-risk experiment. A theatre production in two cities costs a fraction of a Hollywood blockbuster. If it flops, it quietly closes after its February 7 final show and nobody outside of Montreal and Paris ever thinks about it again. If it works, Ubisoft has a touring show it can scale up. Cirque du Soleil has proven for decades that acrobatic spectacle sells tickets in exactly these markets.

A Franchise Spreading Thin

The timing is interesting because Heredis isn't the only non-game Assassin's Creed project making noise this week. Ubisoft's social media team has been busy on another front entirely, calling out a well-known leaker over doctored screenshots of Assassin's Creed Invictus, the long-rumoured multiplayer spin-off.

An insider who goes by xj0nathan posted what he claimed was a screenshot from a recent Invictus playtest. The official Assassin's Creed account replied within two hours, accusing him of heavily altering the image with AI. "Not great to spread misinformation," the account wrote, before adding that it would share more about the project "when the time is right."

After some back-and-forth, xj0nathan posted the original, unaltered screenshot, and the differences were significant. The sky, the character's outfit colours, the crowd detail; the AI tool had changed far more than just removing a watermark, which is what xj0nathan initially claimed he'd done. He later reuploaded the untouched image and tried to spin the whole exchange as Ubisoft accidentally confirming the leak's legitimacy. I covered the original leak situation earlier this week, and watching the same leaker get publicly corrected by the brand account he was leaking from is a fitting sequel.

Credit to Ubisoft's social team here. The Assassin's Creed account has developed a reputation for actually engaging with bad-faith posts rather than ignoring them, and calling out AI-altered images specifically feels like the right fight to pick in 2026. Leaks are one thing. Leaks run through an AI filter that changes what the game actually looks like are something else.

All of this is happening while the franchise's creative leadership continues to shift. Clint Hocking, the creative director on the still-mysterious Assassin's Creed Hexe, left Ubisoft earlier this year and has since founded a new studio called Build Machine Games. His departure followed the exit of franchise head Marc-Alexis Côté, who alleged he was forced out and sued Ubisoft over it. Hexe was announced back in 2022 and has barely been shown since.

So the current state of Assassin's Creed outside of the upcoming Black Flag remake is: a multiplayer spin-off that reportedly had a rough playtest, a supernatural entry that just lost its creative director, and now a French-language stage show premiering in December. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has confirmed multiple AC games are in development, but the franchise feels like it's being pulled in more directions than it can sustain. Heredis might be a clever, low-stakes experiment. It might also be another sign that Ubisoft keeps reaching for new ways to monetise the brand without first steadying the ship on the game side, which is the only side most players actually care about.