Universal Monstrosities: Arthurian Apochrypha

Tom Cruise running from the supernatural wasn’t the only universal catastrophe of cinema last year.

If the cinematic universe’s crash and burn as a trend within the span of five years since coming to fruition wasn’t itself an audacious study of the extreme’s Hollywood will go to hamfist popular concepts where they don’t belong, the good folks at Warner Bros. saw fit to additionally remind us last year that another losing streak that has been in motion for quite some time in the film industry is adaptations of the romantic heroes of medieval literature.

“Robin Hood” is expected to make his return next month in a feature set to star an apparently wasted Taron Egerton while Jamie Foxx seems to have possibly found a worse movie to star in than “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.”

In 2017 however, audiences were presented with the cinematic return of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table in the form of Guy Ritchie’s “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.”

For those that may not remember my little meltdown lastsummer over Hollywood’s insistence that they need money despite throwing hundredsof millions of dollars at movies that nobody seems to want, "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” was something of a grittier but nevertheless fantastical reimagining of Arthurian lore that tanked at the box office stupendously.

Although the film had an undeniable sense of style, garish though it may have become as the bloated film dragged on, its reputation stemmed from the poor telling of a convoluted plot attempting to cover the rise of Arthur to the throne and the beginnings of the formation of the Knights of the Round Table, which was itself objected to utterly horrendous editing.

Ritchie is known to have a fairly frenetic sense of style and while it didn’t quite pan out in this film, the editing that sunk “Legend of the Sword” was on a storytelling level that runs far deeper than the mere satisfaction of individual action beats.

That failure in storytelling, the symptoms of which manifest themselves in the form of 3 bizarrely fragmented acts that not only fail to coalesce into a cohesive narrative but feel more concerned with world building beyond whatever main plot is supposed to be conveyed, is at the source of its attempt at franchising.

I proudly tout myself as a major proponent of the superhero genre but will freely admit that its rise in popularity has created a bizarre skew in Hollywood towards technical trends in favor of creative ones that obviously don’t translate over to every production.

Case in point, the decision to approach the Knights of the Round Table as a cast of skill diverse superheroes, uniting to form something of a medieval Justice League to lead the land into a brighter tomorrow is not an inherently bad approach.

Much of the modern day superhero genre, codified by the presentation of comic books in popular media, was itself an evolution of literary pulp and serial heroes, itself the then modern day and more explicitly fictionalized version of literary heroes whose exploits have been modified even back in their day in retellings via translation, alternate perception stemming from various executions of oral storytelling tradition, etc.

The tales of figures such as “Robin Hood” and “King Arthur” have such substantial variations of one another because few would agree that there’s some sort of universal telling of the tale. The passage of these stories throughout history has substantially obscured whatever their original perceptions may have been, not unlike the changing guard of editorial management and cultural dictation of standards that promote notions of major superhero icons that can be simultaneously central yet contradictory to said character’s identity.

Tackling “Legend of the Sword” like a team based superhero origin story is actually a rather fun idea. The problem is constructing the film to emulate a superhero franchise’s production model.

“Legend of the Sword” was intended to be the launching point for a cinematic universe based on Arthurian Lore with several follow-up films in development serving as “solo movie” spinoffs for the other Knights of the Round Table.

Therein lies the problem; what audience was large enough to justify spending a budget of nearly $200 million in production costs?

Hollywood has a bad mode of thinking in which the popularity of a franchise must rely on the superficial elements rather than the unique one’s baked into a series’ DNA. The “Marvel Cinematic Universe” is a mega franchise connecting several individual characters from radically different backgrounds, dealing with almost entirely unrelated threats in visual ways uniquely distinct from one another, then reminds you of how different each of these characters and the worlds that they occupy are by making them play off of one another.

“Doctor Strange,” “Spider-Man,” and the “Guardians of the Galaxy” all operate fundamentally differently from one another to different ends, which makes for an entertaining contrast when you see them play off of each other. That’s a type of character play that can only really exist in the mold of the superhero genre, as the characters embody completely different genres in and of themselves.

Conversely, the failure of “Legend of the Sword” comes twofold; by virtue of the material’s limitations, no movie can really venture but so far beyond the sword and sorcery fantasy package of the lore itself, and even if it could, it’s been branded through the filter of a grim and self-serious feature that it’s been automatically framed to be judged against.

I’m not saying that decent solo stories involving the individual Knights don’t exist, nor am I saying they can’t be told, but the reason why the cinematic universe concept works is because crossover isn’t a foregone conclusion until it happens. It’s about uniting fans of different properties for unique reasons with major satisfying event that bonds several audiences into one big audience.

The Knights of the Round Table are mostly defined by their union and once that union is brought in, you aren’t creating a cinematic universe, you’re just making barely cohesive spin-offs.

And when those spin-offs are from a movie nobody was particularly excited to see in the build up to its release, is it any surprise that Warner Bros. lost over $100 million on this dud?