Charlie Hunnam Would Like Another Shot at ‘King Arthur’ Franchise After ‘Missed Opportunity’

Charlie Hunnam wants another chance to pull Excalibur from the stone. The actor revealed in a recent interview that, out of all of his roles so far, the one he would like to revisit the most is that of King Arthur. Hunnam believes that there was a lot of wasted potential in his 2017 movie King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

Hunnam played the legendary King Arthur in a 2017 movie that ended up flopping financially. However, in an interview with Andy Cohen on Sirius XM last week, he said that he thought the movie still had a lot of potential, and was even worth a do-over.

“I would like to go back to King Arthur because there’s a lot of things [that] went wrong during that and a lot of things that were out of our control,” he said. “I just don’t think we ended up matching the aspiration.”

“We just didn’t quite make the movie we wanted,” Hunnam continued. “The idea was that if it was a success, we would’ve made several of those films, and I’m really captivated by the Arthurian legends and I just feel like we really missed an opportunity to tell a long-form story.”

Asked if there was one major thing that went wrong with the production, Hunnam said “yes” with a sly smile.

“There was a piece of mis-casting that ended up crippling the central story line,” he said cautiously. “It’s actually not in the film at all.”

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword merged modern fantasy storytelling with classic Arthurian folklore, with a story built around a war between sorcerers and mankind. At the time of its release, there were rumors that as many as five sequels might follow. However, when it performed poorly at the box office, it was scrapped.

The movie was filmed on a budget of $175 million, and ultimately earned $148.7 million back at the box office. As it remained in the red, it is no surprise that the project was cut short there.

It did not help that those who did see the movie gave it middling reviews at best. At the time of this writing it has a 31% score on Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer, based off of 261 total reviews. Audiences were more generous, but they still only ranked it at 69%.

Critics seemed to agree that the movie did too little with its source material, and hinted too much at the direction in which a sequel might go. The result was a lackluster start to the story that the director and screenwriters clearly wanted to tell in the end.

These days, however, the story might get a better reception from audiences. Following the conclusion of Game of Thrones, the fantasy genre has seen an explosion of adaptations, and there will only be more in the coming years. It could be that Hunnam’s wish will be granted somewhere down the line.