The first trailer for the Assassin's Creed movie is finally here, and so far, fans have been reacting positively.
Sword fights? Check. Parkour? Check. Badass costumes? Check. Weird sci-fi stuff? Check.
It looks like Ubisoft, Regency and 20th Century Fox might actually have a good understanding of what makes the game series so popular ... if you ignore the trailer's choice of music, that is.
Having Kanye West's "I am a God" blaring in the trailer for a historical epic set largely in 15th century Spain comes off as a strange choice. More than a few fans agree and have been hard at work replacing the soundtrack of the trailer with more suitable music. A simple search on YouTube brings up dozens of results for "Assassin's Creed movie trailer (No Kanye)." We've compiled a list of some of the better fan edits below to give you an idea of what the film's trailer could have been like with a different soundtrack.
In many instances, the substitute music comes straight from the long-running game series itself. The series has a long history of great music from both the actual games and their promotional trailers. Like this one below, for example, which uses music from Jesper Kyd's iconic Assassin's Creed II soundtrack.
Or this one, which uses the main theme from Assassin's Creed Revelations.
This one features music from Assassin's Creed Brotherhood.
A number of trailers use licensed music that has been featured in some of the franchise's impressive CG trailers. Such is the case with the two videos below.
Many of these fan edits move the order of some of the shots around and also don't match up to the action quite as well as the song in the original trailer music. After all, these are just being quickly made by fans as an example of what a trailer with more suitable music would sound like. These are hardly professionally done, but they still manage to get the point across.
The trailer didn't even need to use music from the game series to be more effective. Simply using more appropriate music would have helped. For example, a little Lorde goes a long way.
Or this trailer edit, which features an appropriately epic-sounding soundtrack.
This is all to say that, as good as the Assassin's Creed trailer is, it could have been even better with a more appropriate soundtrack. Sure, marketers likely selected the well-known Kanye West track in order to appeal to a wider audience, but that doesn't change the fact that it feels remarkably out of place. At the end of the day, however, it's just a trailer. As long as the end product is respectful to the source material, fans shouldn't have much to complain about.
