Charlie Hunnam says if given the chance, he’d want to revisit the story of his 2017 film with Guy Ritchie, “King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword.” The film was a critical turkey and box office bomb, and Hunnam said in an interview that a key miscasting doomed the film.
“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,” Hunnam told Andy Cohen on SiriusXM Radio on Monday. “There was a piece of miscasting that ended up crippling the central story line that’s actually not in the film anymore.”
Hunnam didn’t say which character or actor was miscast in the part. Ritchie however told EW back in 2017 that the original cut of the film was nearly three and a half hours long, including an opening sequence that lasted over 30 minutes. The theatrical release clocks in at just over two hours, and the opening action scene is only 10 minutes in length.
Hunnam teamed up with Ritchie again for his film “The Gentlemen,” which opens in theaters Jan. 24. But Hunnam suggested that if “King Arthur” were a hit, they would’ve made multiple films for a potential franchise.
“I just don’t think we ended up matching the aspiration — we just didn’t quite make the movie we wanted,” Hunnam said. “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.”
“King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” opened to just $15.3 million domestically, and in all it grossed $148.6 million worldwide on a budget of $175 million. The film also has a 31% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Check out a snippet of Hunnam’s interview above.