Sci-Fi Storm

Despite Warner Bros putting Arthur and Lancelot on the extreme fast track last summer with Kit Harington (Game of Thrones) set to play King Arthur with Joel Kinnaman (The Killing) as his champion Lancelot, it came to a screeching halt two months ago when WB felt the budget was too high.

Now it appears that WB may be talking to hot star Colin Farrell to provide some star power to the David Dobkin-directed film, although for which role is uncertain (I’m heading it could be Lancelot though). The lack of an A-list star is possibly another reason WB got cold feet on the budget – and is also cited as a reason that Disney’s even-bigger-budgeted John Carter wasn’t getting much heat either.

Well, we might not be longing for more Camelot adventures of a sort for long. Warner Bros, which scooped up the spec script for Arthur & Lancelot from writer/director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers) in a bidding war last month, has already set a release date of March 15, 2013 and set the budget at $90 million. It is a contemporary re-imagining of the story, with Dobkin set to direct and produce, and Lionel Wigram with Jeff Kleeman exec producing.

This apparently also put the brakes on two other Arthur-based projects in development at WB, including an Excalibur remake,.

The 2011 Primetime Emmy nominations were announced today, and it looks like cable TV is the big winner this year. Read on for a list of the genre shows and their nominations.
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I’m hearing that the ratings for the first showing plus the immediate encore of Torchwood: Miracle Day first episode are on par with what Starz previous original program, Camelot debuted at – but was canceled at the end of it’s fist run. This has some worried, but there were a number a factors involved in the cancellation of Camelot, including scheduling conflicts with the stars. We also don’t know how the budgets compare, which certainly factors in although not in the traditional advertiser-supported model.

Starz has reportedly canceled a second season of it’s freshman Arthurian fantasy drama Camelot after disappointing ratings (averaging a little better than 900,000 viewers, steady by not good). It did have the unfortunate luck of debuting against the heavily buzzed Game of Thrones), which enjoyed closer to 3 times the audience.

Although I liked the series, it seemed like I was always waiting for Merlin (Joseph Fiennes) to finally whip up some magic, or something a little more profound from Arthur (Jamie Campbell Bower), and occasionally getting confused between Igraine (Claire Forlani) and Morgan (Eva Green) even without Morgan’s disguises.

Update: Hearing that scheduling conflicts may have also played a part in the decision, and that ratings had actually risen towards the end, with 1.5 million viewers in the finale.

Starz will air its new take on the King Arthur tale starting April 1st, 2011 at 10PM ET. Camelot, which stars Joseph Fiennes (Flash Forward) as Merlin and Jamie Campbell Bower (The Twilight saga, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows) as King Arthur, is a 10-episode drama show on location in Ireland and will provide a new version of the classic tale. Read on for the press release.

Interestingly, this places it’s debut on the same day that Merlin‘s Series 3 finale should take place on Syfy.

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