Since the Marvel Cinematic Universe has reached new heights every year, the success of those movies have re-written how Hollywood thinks about their franchises. As a result, many other “cinematic universes” were attempted like Universal’s Dark Universe, Sony’s Amazing Spider-Man series, and the Taron Egerton starring Robin Hood. Another that tried and failed to set the box office on fire was King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, the Guy Ritchie-directed, Charlie Hunnam starring fantasy that was released in 2017. Produced on a reported budget of $175 million, the film fell flat on its face, bringing in only $148 million worldwide.
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Speaking in a new interview though, Hunnam revealed the still has affection for the project and wishes he could give it another shot. While discussing his new movie The Gentlemen on SiriusXM’s Radio Andy with Andy Cohen, Hunnam opened up about how much he loved working on the movie and what drew him to it originally.
“I’d like to go back to King Arthur because there’s a lot of things went wrong during that and a lot of things that were out of our control, and I just don’t think we ended up matching the aspiration. We just didn’t quite make the movie we wanted, and the idea was that in success we would’ve made several of those films. I’m really captivated by the Arthurian legends and I just felt like we really missed an opportunity to tell a long-form story.”
Hunnam went on to say that he knows exactly what pushed it off the rails, without naming names.
“There was a piece of miscasting that ended up crippling the central story line. It’s actually not in the film anymore,” Hunnam said.
Though Hunnam wouldn’t say what actor or character he was referring to, it’s possible he meant his co-star Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey. The character that Bergès-Frisbey played in the final cut of the film was simply credited as “The Mage,” but early reports on her casting said she would be playing Arthur’s love interest Guinevere. At what point this change happened is unclear, but extensive reshoots with the film delayed its release by almost a year so the change was clearly made at some point (or perhaps early reports were incorrect).
Hunnam may not get another shot at the Arthurian legends, but Netflix is tapping into it this year with their new TV series Cursed. Based on Thomas Wheeler and Frank Miller’s book of the same name, the series will star Katherine Langford (13 Reasons Why) as the teenager Nimue, aka the Lady in the Lake. The series will be released later this year.
(H/T EW)
