I have no idea why Hollywood keeps trying to make a new King Arthur movie ever few years. Is it not obvious that people aren't interested?
On one hand it's a story that most people are already familiar with (read: beaten over the head with as a child, even though most people like the beating), it has strong characters that are fairly malleable to fit whatever direction you want to go in, it's exciting with swordplay at the very least, and there's a metric ton of material you can pull from, most of it in public domain. To your average studio exec, that looks very appealing.
And because so many different takes have already been done, you can mix and match pieces to your desire, or throw them all in one giant "stew." You've got the aforementioned action, and can take that even further and make it a "boy's film," or even take
that further and throw in some
Ho Yay for a twist - the show Merlin leaned into this a bit. Or you could include the love angle with the Courtly Love that old France loved, the forbidden Arthur/Morgan love for some extra kink, the questionable passionate inferno of Uther Pendragon, or at the very least the old Gwen/Lancelot affair (rape of Gwen by Maleagant and/or Lancelot by Elaine can be thrown in as well). You could play it as a child's tale, or a straight fairy tale (Once And Future King style), or purely historical (Hint: don't ever do this), or political intrigue, or satire, or high fantasy, or a superhero story (some of the earliest Welsh stories are basically this), or a war story, or a comedy (time travel is usually involved here), or even a straight up god epic, but whoever does it will probably do a mixture of all of these things to varying degrees.
From there you can include various themes. You've got: religion (Christianity, Paganism, Druidism - you've got extra leeway here because not only are the last two not widely practiced, but the Christians' mission to completely obliterate all traces of them from the British Isles was so thoroughly successful that we still have to take broad guesses at even the basic aspects of them means that nobody can even attack you for inaccuracy - take that, nerds!), family (bonus points if you go the Arthur is Mordred's daddy route), feminism, might = right, chivalry, them vs us (for realism go with the Saxons, for fantasy go with some combination of Fair Folk/giants/trolls/evil wizards, for craziness go with the Holy Roman Empire), treachery, brain vs brawn, matters of state... the list goes on and on. Depending on how heavily you're leaning into the fantasy aspect, you've got everything from dragons to magic to griffins to Fair Folk to Queen Mab, who doesn't even make any sense but fuck it throw her in too. You don't even have to do it from Arthur's perspective. We've got stories about Merlin, Morgan, Gawain, Gwen, Lancelot, Mordred,
Mordred's fucking dog. You could just go nuts and make it a story all about Pellinore and his dragon who may or may not be real, with special guest stars Lancelot and Arthur. We've got prequels, sequels, after-the-end stories, stories that sound like acid trips, pages of text about jousting tournaments, random adventures that inexplicably contain sets of colors for some reason. If you want you can throw in the goddamn Holy Grail. No, it doesn't make sense. Mallory and the French didn't care, so why should you? Or, throw it in but make it not
that Grail. Just
a Grail. Throw in all the winks and nods you want.
Now you can step back and say "Damn, that's a lot of good shit you can do." And you're right. There's a lot of good shit in those hills. And writers, and directors, and producers and studio execs know it too. But there's a problem that most don't immediately see, or ever see. Instead of reading those last couple paragraphs I've typed up and looking at the possibilities, look at what I've used as supporting arguments. All of those things I've listed aren't me brainstorming or throwing ideas at the wall - they're specific references. All of those takes and themes and ideas have been done. Some of them have been done multiple times. At this point, this isn't a well-trodden path. This is a carefully cataloged and documented city park disguised as a wilderness. You already know your favorite aspects, which paths you want to go down, your favorite views. Even if you do something unusual, you know you're still in the same park that everyone else is in. Different views, same basic structures.
I'm not saying nobody else should take a stab at an Arthur story. There's been plenty of good ones, and there will be plenty more. But it is something that requires some thought and creativity to grab an audience's attention and not seem old hat.
Which is why it's baffling to me that someone looked at the King Arthur legend and decided that 2017 needs a
darker and edgier action film version. The action genre is already packed as it is, and with stories that can provide greater degrees of it than this looks capable of. The dark and edgy aspects look mild, with aesthetics that look like they're from 10 years ago, and the dark nature of films from 20 years ago. I'm not sure who this film is supposed to interest in 2017. Even more confusing is the fact that they wanted to make this a multi-film universe at one point. Like, on what basis? On the off chance everyone decides to skip Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and see this instead, justifying more of these?
Good fucking luck.