So far he’s cast Charlie Hunnam from “Sons of Anarchy” as Arthur, a French babe as Guinevere (she certainly looks Guineverean), and Idris Elba as some Merlin-like character. Does this have any reasonable chance of actually making it through six films, or will it die on the vine in a Narnia-esque way?
I’d very much guess the latter, but it’s just a guess. Sustaining a successful big budget six-film arc seems like quite a stretch. Frankly I think a HBO/Showtime-type pitch would be a more reasonable direction to go, but then I think that about a number of subjects that seem to worm their way into big screen productions.
Have to say I’m not loving the initial plot sketch. I’ve read too much Mary Stewart I suppose.
I also don’t see the Arthur story building up enough excitement to sustain such a project. It’s been done. To death.
Charlie Hunnam is 34 years old. A six-movie series might take 12-18 years (depending on whether you a movie every two or three years). I’d have started with a younger actor.
I dunno, Arthur is supposed to be pretty old by the time he’s mortally wounded by Mordred.
The six TOS star trek films took 12 years and I don’t get the feeling there was any particular rush for them, so I think you could probably do the six movie series in 6-8 years if you really cared.
But never well. The Arthurian legend is great more because of its size and scope, than because any one sub-story in it is all that compelling on its own. All of the attempts to bundle it up into a 2 hour show have been unable to demonstrate why it’s a classic. I mean, to date, probably the best adaptations have been Gawain and the Green Knight and Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, neither of which is really a classic. The most that can be said of them is that they don’t try to reinvent the original story in stupid ways.
Overall, I’d say that the casting, the director, and the length sound perfect.
But it would be better as a TV series. Films cost too much, 12 hours is still pretty small for the Arthurian legend, and no one story is good enough to push into a 2 hour timeframe and gain a following. Unless they can get these films to us within a couple of months of one-another, it’s not going to work.
Perhaps the studio was looking for something like the Lord of the Rings books and movies and figured that this public-domain legend might work.
Reading the article the OP linked to is NOT reassuring. It looks like this movie will have very little to do with Sir Thomas Mallory’s Arthur, but be more like a Marvel-comics Arthur-as-superhero. With a shaved head.
I gotta tell you…as much as I love the musical Camelot, I’d like to see a new, big-screen, non-musical adaptation of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King.
There are four actual books in the main work, but I can see them doing it as a trilogy. After all, aside from the introduction of Morgause, the very beginnings of the Round Table, and the conception of Mordred, nothing very much *happens *in The Queen of Air and Darkness.
So I could see them doing one movie for The Sword In The Stone, covering Arthur’s childhood, one that covers The Queen of Air and Darkness and The Ill-Made Knight, covering Morgause, the start of the Round Table, the conception of Mordred, the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere and her affair with Lancelot, and one for The Candle in the Wind, about the fall of the realm.
That would be SO much better than what that article said!! But there would be the question of which version of The Sword in the Stone they do – the stand-alone book or the book in the quadrogy? (There are many differences; f’rinstance, Madam Mim is only in the stand-alone book, and the visits with the ants and wild geese are only in The Once and Future King)
Perhaps. But my argument, which I didn’t communicate well, is simply that there’s not the built-in rabid fanbase to sustain such a project. Not like, for instance, Lord of the Rings, or Marvel comics. There’s not a thriving subculture of Arthurian enthusiasts - at least not to the same extent. Sure, it’s possible that a really awesome first movie might launch such a fanbase, but that’s a risk; and a risk that today’s sequel-heavy, franchise-based movie industry seems very reluctant to take.
The nice thing with King Arthur is that he basically is a superhero. Besides being the star of Camelot 3000 (which is a decent, though odd read), Marvel has characters like Thor, they have groups of heroes who work together as a collective, with internal tension. Groups like X-Men and the Avengers are basically the descendants of the Knights of the Round Table, and heroes like Superman and Thor are descendants of King Arthur. Updating the Arthur stories to be more Marvel-esque makes a lot more sense than doing the same to Sherlock Holmes. It probably won’t actually change them that much, allows us to bypass child actors (see Star Wars), and sucks a lot less than adding in all these feminist, demonology, wiccan, whatever nonsense that they keep seeming to put in all the post-1990 attempts at modernizing the stories.
I think you’re underestimating the fan base for King Arthur. It may not be as rabid as LotR’s, but it’s a lot larger. Pretty much everyone knows who Arthur is, and most people have encountered him in one of the thousands of adaptions based off his legend.
Another thing about the “rabid fanbases” for the Lord of the Rings or the Marvel movies is that the movies can’t succeed purely because of them. My guess is that these fanbases are only a few million people and any big, blockbuster movie needs to appeal more widely to make the kind of money necessary to recoup an investment of $200 million or more.
And I agree that the Arthur legend is widely known. (On the other hand, I went to see the Guardians of the Galaxy movie despite no prior knowledge of the comic book origins.)
There are plenty of things that might go wrong here. For example, the writer listed in IMDb only has one other credit to his name, a film I’m unfamiliar with:
And Guy Ritchie could end up giving us another highly stylized Tarantino production…I can’t think of anything he’s done that didn’t have snappy street dialogue or slow-motion ultraviolence.
And yet I want this to work, because I grew up reading and loving some of the novelized versions listed above.
I’ll bet that if the studio decides to proceed with this movie, they won’t leave screenwriting duties entirely to that guy with one credit; they’ll need to protect their investment.