Trivia / King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Charlie Hunnam claims he was convinced to go for the part when the film was pitched as "The Lord of the Rings meets Snatch.".
• Billing Displacement: Promo materials list Charlie Hunnam and Jude Law; official cast releases (not IMDb) have the top list as Hunnam, Katie McGrath, and Law. Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey seems to be missing, replaced by a popular name that's also linked to Arthur already.
• Box Office Bomb: Not including its marketing budget, the film cost $175 million to make and grossed $140 million. It lost about $150 million according to the worst estimates, which puts it at the sixth place among the most colossal box office bombs in nominal losses (17th when adjusted for inflation).
• Dyeing for Your Art: Charlie Hunnam had lost twenty pounds for the last season of Sons of Anarchy and had to gain the muscle mass back in order to play Arthur. He apparently got into a routine of doing over a thousand push-ups a day. What's more is that all the swordplay training he was doing was acting as cardio, burning off a lot of his muscle, so he had to do extra work to regain it.
• Fake Brit: Eric Bana is Australian and puts on an English accent to play Uther.
• Production Posse: Jude Law has worked with Guy Ritchie on both the Sherlock Holmes films.
• Promoted Fanboy: Charlie Hunnam has said that he loved Excalibur as a kid. And now he gets to play King Arthur.
• Real-Life Relative: Freddie Fox's sister was married to Annabelle Wallis' cousin.
• Remake Cameo: Katie McGrath plays Elsa, the wife of Vortigern and aunt of Arthur, in this film, but previously portrayed Morgana in Merlin (2008).
• Stillborn Franchise: It was planned to be the first of a six part series. The low box office numbers killed those hopes instantly. The Hollywood Reporter even complained that a standalone King Arthur movie instead of one that ends with the Round Table built and Merlin yet to be introduced could've worked much better.
• Throw It In!: The brief clip of Arthur shadowboxing early in the film was Charlie Hunnam just "trying to stay in the zone" during the takes.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Henry Cavill, Jai Courtney, Colin Farrell and Liam Hemsworth were the final contenders for the role of King Arthur before Charlie Hunnam was cast.
    • Sam Claflin, Jim Sturgess, Dominic Cooper and Benjamin Walker were also considered for the part before the casting of Hunnam.
  • Elizabeth Olsen, Alicia Vikander and Felicity Jones had discussions for the role of the Mage before the casting of Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey.
  • Warner Bros. had been discussing a potential Arthurian movie for years, resulting in several competing projects, but this is the only one to date that was Saved from Development Hell.
    • Guy Ritchie had been tapped to direct a completely different Arthurian film tentatively called Excalibur, penned by Warren Ellis and no relation to John Boorman's 1981 film of the same name.
    • Bryan Singer had been working on a remake of Boorman's Excalibur until he quit and went back to the X-Men franchise with X-Men: Days of Future Past.
    • David Dobkin was attached to write and direct Arthur & Lancelot, which would've starred Kit Harington and Joel Kinnaman in the titular parts respectively. However, the project was scrapped due to various concerns over the film's budget and the casting of the two leads.
  • Guinevere was meant to feature as Arthur's Love Interest. Guy Ritchie later said that he just couldn't give that storyline enough screen time. Her character was rewritten to eventually become The Mage. According to Charlie Hunnam, Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey was "very instrumental" in the way the character evolved in development; he describes her take on the character as "a bit more aggressive than it had been on the page."
  • Arthur's introduction as an adult was originally supposed to have a full-on Training Montage, in the vein of Rocky.
• Working Title: The title was originally Knights of the Round Table: King Arthur (some reports give Roundtable as one word). Since this was originally planned as the first of a six-part series, presumably the name of the knight would change in later films.

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