ioi should make a TV show about 47 just doing contracts, no lore. Each episodes shows him doing different contracts and showcasing his skill.
So basically The Killer (2023) but without a plot.
A show needs an underlying narrative. The 2016 game is a good example of this. While the contracts are, at a glance, disconnected, and you can just simply ignore the story surrounding it for the most part, they are interwoven to be more compelling so you are more invested in the world. That’s not a bad thing.
Remember, an adaptation is just as much at getting fans to like it as much as newcomers to enjoy it just as much. Doing something solely for the fans is gonna leave a larger chunk of your audience unsatisfied. I have no reference point for Splinter Cell, but I fully enjoyed the Netflix show of it; I’m actually doing a second rewatch as I type this.
I was working on a webcomic a while ago called Eidolon, which I never released anywhere. I wanted it to be a sort of “day in the life” of an assassin, but quickly came to the conclusion it was incredibly boring to me without some kind of overarching story and/ or mystery. The first thing you learn about storytelling is that conflict is the best way to make drama. How that comes about is up to the writer. Slice of Life can work, but even those have some kind of overarching story moving things along.
SpyxFamily is quasi-slice of life. It has an overarching narrative, but a lot of episodes do stand on their own as either unrelated to the main story, or specific hits which are also unrelated. But even there, these seeming unrelated moments are usually to accomplish something greater, or to keep the peace between two warring nations.
So yeah, 47 doing assassinations and showing off skills and kills sounds cool in theory, but the actual premise is very flawed in practice.
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They’ve done what now? Tease us with a new game for nearly a decade, but Netflix gets a two-season interpersonal drama whaat
Hitman is best left as a game, like most other video games. They’ve tried films for the franchise, same with Assassins Creed and Tomb Raider and all were panned.
You’ll never capture the full magic of the games, no matter how hard you try 
I like the one with Olyphant. Rewatching it occasionally.
Good stuff
When I was I kid I loved watching Mission Impossible. I don’t remember the series having a global narrative.
I have an idea for, at the very least, a setup for how a Hitman series could work, if we make one little tweak to 47’s origin. For the series, everything is the same as the game series in terms of 47’s origin, except that his wiped memories slowly get restored over time as he completes hits. I don’t know what kind of mechanism can be used to make this work, let’s say the same kind of magical all-purpose science Ort-Meyer did in the games to make 47 includes the ability to wipe memories and slowly restore then piece by piece as certain actions are taken, in this case, killing. Whenever 47 kills someone, a small bit of his memory of his childhood is restored, and so his missions can be unrelated to each other, but at the end of each one, 47 gets a flash of memory that connects to others he unlocks. This would also ensure that he keeps coming back as a hitman instead of leaving the life, but he still has his same personality from the games, so he’s not just gonna go out and kill random people to unlock memories, he has to adhere to the disciplined system that contract killing allows him to operate in. Don’t know what this would build toward and what the significance would be at the end once 47 unlocks all his memories, but it’s a start. And there’s our overarching narrative without the actual missions having to be connected.
A lot of older TV shows generally didn’t do that. It just wasn’t the writing style at the time. Remember, this was before the age of the internet or forums, so there wasn’t a need to placate to that userbase. It is not a coincidence that Sci-fi, such as Star Trek and the currently on hiatus Doctor Who, did write like this, and were unusual in that they did have a sense of continuity.
Soaps also have an underlying narrative, but they have to because of the way they’re made (daily episodes recorded over a period of months during the year that had a heavy focus on the lives of characters).
I mean, the Assassins Creed film was more boring than badly made., and there was a recent Netflix animated series that focused on bridging the gaps between the OG trilogy and the prequel Survivor trilogy; a job it excelled at, and was a pretty fun watch. I really do not think that you lose the “magic” as you call it, by switching mediums, particularly for games that are already story-focused to begin with.
Like with any adaptation, there will be changes in story, either because the medium necessitates it, because it wasn’t received well before, or to make it follow a particular narrative to set up something greater. The Sonic films from 2018, 2022 and 2024 all have a unique take on the blue blur, and the third one is especially enjoyable for how much it either improves on Sonic Adventure 2, or makes everyone have more of a reason to be where they are, while still keeping the core aspects of the story in its own canon.
And even the 2015 Hitman film, which I consider better than the 2007 one because it at least didn’t bore me to death, and did have some decent gameplay-> film translations of some of the mechanics.
We’ve seen a greater understanding by directors and writers on how to translate videogames into films and TV Shows. Arcane, the aforementioned Tomb Raider show, Dota’s Dragons Blood, Fallout, Twisted Metal, Sonic the Hedgehog, they’re all doing very well for a genre of film that was once box-office and ratings poison.