This comes as a huge blow to fans that want a faith­ful adap­ta­tion of the PoP fran­chise. A com­pany spokesper­son for Ubisoft, in speak­ing with CVG, said that Ubisoft has no involve­ment with Disney’s Prince of Per­sia movie:

“The new Prince of Per­sia film is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between [Prince of Per­sia cre­ator] Jor­dan Mech­ner and Dis­ney,” it said. “Ubisoft has no involvement.”

This also means that the recent acqui­si­tion of Hybride Tech­nol­ogy by Ubisoft is com­pletely unre­lated to the Prince of Per­sia movie, some of us had hoped that the effects stu­dio behind 300 would soon be com­ing aboard the project — though this lat­est news does put down these rumors, a fur­ther com­ment is encouraging:

“Hybride and Ubisoft will work together to share tech­nol­ogy and develop tools in order to opti­mize the cre­ation of both video games and visual effects. Ulti­mately, we expect to use the part­ner­ship to lever­age our brands in the movie industry.”

Cin­ema Notizie has posted an exclu­sive Prince of Per­sia movie poster. Whether this is gen­uine is debat­able, and given the dis­tinct lack of any offi­cial pro­mo­tional mate­r­ial being released, I would guess that this is fake. Although it’s still an inter­est­ing and atmos­pheric poster:

Just a quick one to fill you in. In our post about the false Orlando Bloom rumors, some com­menters have pointed out that Dis­ney have recently offered the role to Broke­back Moun­tain star, Jake Gyl­len­haal. Accord­ing to Latino Review and their anony­mous sources, they believe this could hap­pen, we’re doubt­ful for now.

Rumors have started cir­cu­lat­ing the net that Orlando Bloom had landed a $40m deal to star as the Prince in the Per­sia tril­ogy. These have spread like wild­fire across our dig­i­tal lands amidst uproar at the pay pack­age and the choice of actor.

Com­ing Soon, wise as ever, did the clever thing of con­tact­ing Dis­ney. Their response? These rumors are plainly false — and Orlando Bloom shall not be fea­tur­ing in the tril­ogy.

19 year old Aus­tralian Char­lie Clausen has been reported as the lead in the video game adap­ta­tion which could be his first big hol­ly­wood break. This report seems to have come from an Aus­tralian mag­a­zine called “Hyper”. IMDb cur­rently lists Clausen as attached and no con­fir­ma­tion of his role in the movie exists. How­ever many web­sites includ­ing IGN are stat­ing this as fact, which remains to be seen — some of his IMDb pro­file shots do bear a resem­blance to the Prince.