Recently, Inverse had a nice chat with screenwriter Brian Helgeland, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the film Man on Fire. Helgeland has written and/or directed quite a few other movies you might have heard of, among them the Heath Ledger-starring A Knight’s Tale. And as it turns out, once upon a time, there were sequel ideas for that film.
One was, er, perhaps not the most stellar idea (it involved kidnapping and a tattooed map and pirates). The other was a somewhat predictable but well-intentioned concept apparently come up with by Paul Bettany (who played Chaucer in the film) and Alan Tudyk (who played Wat). The story would have followed the teen daughter of William (Ledger’s character), who wished to joust but was not allowed to, being a girl and all. (Side note: If you are going to make historically anachronistic movies, you can leave out the sexism! Just saying!) But there was someone—or rather, something—standing in the way. As Helgeland says:
I pitched it to Sony because they own the rights, and it seemed like they were interested in making it with Netflix, releasing it as a Netflix movie. My understanding is that Netflix tested this sequel idea through their algorithms, which indicated that it would not be successful. A Knight’s Tale seems to get more popular with every passing year; it’s the strangest thing.
The computer said no. We live in a very depressing timeline.
Helgeland also goes into his plans for a Game of Thrones spinoff, Ten Thousand Ships, that seems unlikely to ever happen; he was working on the story of Queen Nymeria, and created a story in which she and her people live on a floating city-state. “My work is still there if HBO wants to pick it up. I enjoyed my time developing it, and you just never know,” he says. That is a lot of ships, though.
