Last year, news broke that Warner Bros was reviving the classic Arthurian saga, with Guy Ritchie at the helm, and potentially five more films after the first hits theatres on July 22, 2016.
Last week, more news broke that Guy Ritchie is seriously pursuing Jamie Dornan (Once Upon a Time, The Fall, Fifty Shades of Grey) for a part in the series. Previous casting rumours include Idris Elba as a “Merlin-esque figure.”
Unfortunately, the plot is very hush hush, so we have no idea if it’s going to be more in the vein of Excalibur (1981) or King Arthur (2004). Again, all we know is that apparently it will be a six volume epic – yes, you read that right, we’re talking Harry Potter length here, not Lord of the Rings – and will be based on an original screenplay by Joby Harold (Awake).
It’s not looking too promising, apart from Ritchie’s direction and the potential involvement of Elba. Given Ritchie’s track record, and especially considering his Sherlock Holmes reboot, it is doubtful that he’s going to take on the classic Mallory tale as is – I’m betting on some sort of revisionist interpretation.
I’m welcome to new approaches to Arthur, but when there’s so much of the source material that haven’t been realized on the big screen, as well as contemporary novelizations (Bernard Cornwell’s The Warlord Chronicles or Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragan Cycle would make excellent adaptations to the big screen) that made their own original contributions, I wonder how it’s going to say anything new or substantial about the characters or story.
So while it’s nice to hear that Ritchie’s starting to scope out his cast, I’m less worried about the actors involved than the approach that the script is taking. But it may be a while before we hear anything substantial about that, so I guess we’ll have to be satisfied with casting rumours.