Charlie Hunnam is a notable name on the small screen thanks to his career-making turn as Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy. (Although shoutout to starring in Undeclared before that.). He’s had a lot of notable big screen roles as well, starring in Pacific Rim and the Netflix retelling of the famous book The Lost City of Z opposite none other than Robert Pattnson. But there’s one big budget movie I still feel did not get its due when it came out back in 2017. That movie would be King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.
The good news? If you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s coming to Netflix. Even better? It’s coming to Netflix soon. The subscription streaming service announced earlier this month that King Arthur: Legend of The Sword will be available starting on October 25th. It’s not the perfect type of movie to typically get a Halloween release, but I will say it could be the perfect excuse to curl up with a movie while waiting for trick or treaters to show up.
The Guy Ritchie movie initially hit theaters in 2017 and while it made $148 million at the box office, it wasn’t exactly cheap to produce. In fact, it allegedly had a $175 million budget before marketing, making the flick a flop in theaters. But Guy Ritchie clearly had bigger plans for the characters. The price tag was seemingly expected to lead to a franchise, as the end of the flick --without spoilers-- sets up for more to come from Charlie Hunnam and co.
It’s a shame the Warner Bros. film didn’t live up to its full potential. We’re always talking about new and fun IPs coming to theaters and that's what King Arthur offered: it had great comedy and wild appearance from Jude Law as a villain, all tied together with that Guy Ritchie flair. While King Arthur is a character from legend and has been around in varying projects for a long time, this could have been the start of an action adventure series that would have been a new franchise beyond what Warner Bros. has been bringing to the table in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter or within the DCEU.
Regardless, Netflix has been a great place for this sort of underrated movie to thrive in the past. Past projects that have followed this trajectory include the Mark Wahlberg starrer Patriots Day, which hit Netflix over the Fourth of July weekend and totally dominated. Another time, an underrated Liam Neeson action film Unknown, which came out in the wake of the actor’s Taken success, also did extremely well during its Netflix run, landing in the Top 10 for a period.
Granted, Hunnam has kind of shied away from franchise runs in general, saying no to Fifty Shades of Grey (which he totally does not regret) and missing out on the Pacific Rim sequel in favor of filming Papillon. When it comes to playing King Arthur, however, Hunnam has been open that some things happened during the making of the 2017 movie that led to it not coming out exactly as the team wanted. He’s said before he’d be game to try again, if the opportunity presented itself, noting,
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. I just don’t think we ended up matching the aspiration — we just didn’t quite make the movie we wanted. 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.
You mean the type of creative freedom that Netflix allegedly gives its projects? I’m just sayin.’ Obviously, it’s a little early to know whether or not King Arthur: Legend of the Sword will attract enough notice to make Netflix’s coveted Top 10 list. However, as a fan myself, I’m just jazzed that the movie will have an easy opportunity to be watched by a slew of eyeballs at the end of the month. In some ways, if it hits on Netflix it will be a little bittersweet, however, to think of what Charlie Hunnam could have done as Arthur if the movie had popped in the way he had hoped.
