King Arthur: Legend of the Sword failed due to one key bit of miscasting says star Charlie Hunnam. Directed by Guy Ritchie, Legend of the Sword was supposed to kick off an entire franchise of movies built around the King Arthur legend. Unfortunately, the film was a non-starter at the box office with only $148 million grossed worldwide on a reported budget of $175 million.

With numbers like that, it’s easy to see why the planned King Arthur franchise never got off the ground. The one film that was made, Legend of the Sword, starred Hunnam as the tituar Arthur, in what was meant to be a gritty and street-level take on the famed mythical character. With Ritchie at the helm though, the movie was criticized for emphasizing CG-enhanced action over character. Critics were indeed as down on the film as audiences and it currently holds a 31% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

At least going by the reviews, a lot went wrong with Ritchie’s take on King Arthur, but star Hunnam seems to believe the film could’ve still been salvaged had one key thing gone differently. Appearing on Sirius XM’s Radio Andy (via CBR), Hunnam admitted that indeed the film had a lot of problems:

Specifically, Hunnam said a single casting mistake was largely to blame for the film not working as intended. “There was a piece of miscasting that ended up crippling the central story line. It’s actually not in the film anymore,” he said. Hunnam did not name the actor whose miscasting caused the issue, however, in 2016 there were reports that Ritchie was not happy with the performance of Annabelle Wallis as Maggie and ended up cutting her out of most of the film. Those reports have never been confirmed, but Hunnam’s remarks definitely indicate that someone in the cast performed poorly enough to have their role significantly reduced, hurting the movie’s main storyline.

“I’d like to go back to King Arthur because there’s a lot of things went wrong during that and a lot of things that were out of our control. I just don’t think we ended up matching the aspiration — we just didn’t quite make the movie we wanted. The idea was that if it was a success, we would’ve made several of those films, and I’m really captivated by the Arthurian legends and I just feel like we really missed an opportunity to tell a long-form story.”

Indeed, Ritchie himself at one point revealed that the box office bomb’s first cut was over three hours but it was eventually trimmed way down to just over two hours. Reviews of the film do also point to Wallis’ character being “underdeveloped” and some critics even mention being confused about who she was supposed to be, circumstances that could be explained by many of her scenes being cut out.

Whether Hunnam is right in his assessment of what killed King Arthur: Legend of the Sword at the box office, or is just making excuses, is a question that can’t really be answered. Certainly, many movies have been hurt by bad casting, and trying to cut around a poor performance can absolutely diminish a film’s overall effectiveness. That being said, it’s also possible King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was simply ill-conceived from the get-go and that, as many critics have said, Ritchie was just the wrong director for the material.

More: Why Guy Ritchie Isn’t Directing Sherlock Holmes 3

Source: Sirius XM’s Radio Andy (via CBR), Female First