Despite being one of the most enduring legends in history, King Arthur hasn’t exactly had the best run of luck on the big screen throughout the 21st Century.
Antoine Fuqua’s gritty and grounded origin story may have featured a stacked cast of established and rising talent, but it was roundly panned by critics and under-performed at the box office. Guy Ritchie’s Legend of the Sword was awful, and wound up as one of the biggest box office bombs in history, while Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Would be King tanked hard as well.
However, could The Daily Wire be the ones to finally give the Arthurian lore a glorious update? We’ve got no idea, but the conservative outlet is going to try for some reason. As revealed by Deadline, the outfit has acquired the rights to literary fantasy series The Pendragon Cycle, a six-book saga retelling the well-trodden tale centuries before its established medieval setting.
Why are The Daily Wire moving into ambitious fantasy territory? Who knows, but it’s happening. co-CEO Jeremy Boreing described it as the budding studio’s “most ambitious” project to date in the “no sh*t” statement of the day, before outlining his plans for the property.
“It’s based on perhaps the most impactful myth in Western tradition, the Legend of King Arthur. Today, I’m beyond thrilled to announce that DailyWire+ has secured the rights to produce an adaptation of the novels as a series to stream exclusively on our platform.”
We’ve seen three Arthurian epics in the last 18 years, and they all fared poorly with either critics or at the box office, and regularly both. Is The Daily Wire capable of arresting the slide? We’ll be goddamned if we’ve got a clue, but it’s certainly bizarre enough to merit keeping an eye on as it progresses.
