Zack Snyder’s Justice League is still weeks away, and the Snyder news cycle continues apace. Last week, in a video interview with Minutemen, Snyder mused about a potential future project: a “faithful retelling” of the myth of King Arthur.
You can listen to Snyder’s words on the matter just before the 35 minute mark in the video above, but he says very little:
“I’m working on something, but we’ll see. I’ve been thinking about some kind of retelling, like real sort of faithful retelling, of that Arthurian mythological concept. We’ll see. Maybe that will come at some point.”
Two questions immediately arise: Why? and also, Faithful to what, exactly? I am not an expert, but the origins of the Arthurian mythos are muddy and broad and there is no one true source that requires fidelity in all things. (Lavie Tidhar recently wrote a lively piece on the matter of the Matter of Britain, if you’d like a refresher on Geoffrey of Monmouth and a few of the other folks who have told versions of this story.)
Arthurian tales are kind of like mint run wild in a garden: uncontainable and occasionally quite refreshing. We are still waiting on the pandemic-postponed The Green Knight, which stars Dev Patel as Sir Gawain, one of Arthur’s knights. Last year, Netflix aired Cursed, an adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel about a girl destined to become the Lady of the Lake. Epix is reportedly developing Bernard Cornwall’s Arthur-adjacent Warlord Chronicles. Ridley Scott might be directing an adaptation of T.A. Barron’s Merlin Saga. In 2019, we had Joe Cornish’s charming The Kid Who Would Be King; two years before that, of course, Guy Ritchie offered the widely maligned King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword.
And that’s not even getting into recent Arthurian-inspired novels or all the previous adaptations.
What will Snyder bring to the table? What does he think a faithful retelling entails? Surely we will find out soon enough.
