The final season may have disappointed the vast majority of fans, but it still can’t be denied that Game of Thrones reigned supreme as TV’s most prominent and popular fantasy series for the entire time it was on the air. With the show having drawn to a close, there’s now a real gap in the market when it comes to being named as heir apparent to the adventures in Westeros.
HBO are working on their own Game of Thrones spinoff and will have their fingers crossed that House of the Dragon will win over an alienated fanbase, while Amazon are in the process of mounting a mega-budget series based on The Lord of the Rings. Netflix’s The Witcher also surprised a lot of people by becoming the most popular show on the planet when the first season dropped, and now the streaming giant have high hopes for their next venture into the realm of fantasy.
The King Arthur story has been done to death over the years, and just recently it suffered two high-profile box office bombs in the shape of Guy Ritchie’s Legend of the Sword and Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Would Be King, but Netflix seem confident that their female-driven riff on the legend will be their next major hit when Cursed arrives on July 17th.
It isn’t particularly encouraging that the first trailer has some superficial similarities to Guy Ritchie’s heavily-stylized take on the material, and doesn’t offer much in the way of plot details either apart from the fact that it’s yet another spin on a tale we’ve seen countless times before, except this time with a gender-bent twist.
It appears that Cursed is being positioned as Netflix’s more family-friendly companion piece to The Witcher though, and no doubt a lot of 13 Reasons Why fans will be checking it out given Katherine Langford’s presence in the lead. We’ll have to wait until next month though to find out for ourselves if it’ll turn out to be another major success for the company’s original lineup of TV shows.