The 2004 movie Keira Knightley knew was pointless: “We’ve seen it so many times”
At least once a year, a movie comes along that makes everyone question why it even needed to exist in the first place. Keira Knightley felt the same way in 2004, and she was in it, which doesn’t mean she was wrong. In fact, she was bang on, because everyone else felt the same way.
You’ve got to wonder what goes on in those Hollywood boardrooms, because audiences have a funny way of sniffing out a purposeless picture from a mile off. Take 2026, for instance: did anyone think a $175 million reboot of Masters of the Universe would be anything other than a big, fat flop?
Hopefully not, and to the shock of nobody except the studio that footed the bill, making an even more expensive version of a fantasy caper that flopped the first time around did not go well. As mentioned, it’s an annual occurrence, and even though she was swayed eventually, Knightley was right on the money.
Having been the subject of well over a dozen feature-length tales already, which spanned decades and covered virtually every aspect of the mythology, who was crying out for Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur? Sure, it tried something a little different by reinterpreting the title character and his associates as Roman soldiers rather than the standard knights in shining armour, but who was it made for?
“When I first heard they were doing a new version of King Arthur, I said, ‘Oh, what’s the point? We’ve seen it so many times before: we all know the legends, we all know the story so well,'” Knightley said at the time, with unerring accuracy. However, she eventually changed her tune, even if the point still stands.
“Then I read the script, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,'” the actor continued. “But I was a tiny bit terrified, and excited, to take a role as well-known as Guinevere and completely change it, but it’s about time we had a new version of Guinevere.” Admirable, but if you’ve seen 2004’s King Arthur, you’ll be well aware that she was completely miscast in the role.
Knightley asked what the point was in the film’s existence, and the answer is obvious: Gladiator. Once Ridley Scott had steered his expensive historical epic to critical, commercial, and awards season success, the industry did what it always does and instantly hopped on the bandwagon in the hopes of lightning striking twice, which it rarely does.
The only one of those rapid-fire spiritual successors that made more money than Russell Crowe’s Oscar-winning outing as Maximus was Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, and not by much. King Arthur, meanwhile, was a bomb. Not a massive bomb, but a bomb nonetheless, with the Pirates of the Caribbean alum inadvertently hitting the nail on the head, since the movie failed to justify its existence.
On the plus side, as tedious and forgettable as it was, Fuqua’s flick was nowhere near as bad as Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, which cost even more money, flopped even harder, and was almost impressively even more pointless than its big-screen predecessor.
