Apparently, Netflix’s algorithm passed on A Knight’s Tale sequel

We already knew the entertainment industry has more or less become a technocracy, but hearing about it still feels surreal. Sadly, all the human entertainment execs can do these days is lay down mere mortal ideas on the altar of the almighty algorithm, enslaved to the whims of whatever ones and zeroes say will be successful. That is to say, according to A Knight’s Tale director Brian Helgeland, Netflix shot down his pitch for a sequel because its algorithm said so.

“Paul Bettany called me after he had dinner with Alan Tudyk, and the guys had an idea that William had passed away during a war,” Helgeland said to Inverse about the original film’s title character, played by the late Heath Ledger. “However, William has a teenage daughter who wants to joust, but she’s not allowed to because she’s a woman. She tracks down the gang and they agree to teach her how to joust, but she has to hide who she is. They cut her hair short and she speaks with a deep voice, et cetera.”

Helgeland explained, “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.”

Of course, we have no idea what data Netflix collected about A Knight’s Tale—did the algorithm reveal no one would want to see a sequel without Ledger? Do teenage girls inheriting their fathers’ legacies test poorly? According to Netflix’s head of content Bela Bajaria, “algorithms don’t decide what we make” at all. At an event in June 2023 (via Variety), she argued that this was evident in content like The Queen’s Gambit or Beef. “There’s not an algorithm that would probably say, you know what’s a great idea? A period show about a woman playing chess,” nor would it encourage the platform to “do something thematically about connection and loneliness, and maybe throw in road rage for the inciting incident,” she said.

The distinction, however, is that Bajaria was speaking about the creation of shows and films, not the decision to greenlight them. Certainly, data collected by Netflix’s algorithms influence whether its television series get renewed. But Netflix’s Technology Blog also laid out exactly how its engineers “[support] content decision makers with machine learning.” The 2020 blog post sketches out how the engineers test the viability of certain ideas and which factors are weighted in the algorithm. “We identified two ways to support content decision makers: surfacing similar titles and predicting audience size, drawing from various areas such as transfer learning, embedding representations, natural language processing, and supervised learning,” the blog summarized. “Surfacing these types of insights in a scalable manner is becoming ever more crucial as both our subscriber base and catalog grow and become increasingly diverse.”

This is not brand-new technology, and companies like Netflix have probably only become more reliant on algorithmic data in the years since that blog was posted (assuming the tech becomes more sophisticated all the time). As fans have pointed out, the Knight’s Tale tale echoes the Barry parody of Sally’s series getting canceled because “the algorithm felt it wasn’t hitting the right taste clusters.”

If you’re a big Knight’s Tale fan—and the filmmaker notes his movie “seems to get more popular with every passing year”—you’ll be disappointed to learn that this is not the first sequel idea shot down. “When we finished A Knight’s Tale, we were already thinking about making the sequel as a pirate film,” Helgeland told the outlet. “The plot revolved around Count Adhemar kidnapping Jocelyn and taking her to Constantinople. They end up as galley slaves after their boat is captured by pirates. There’s a prisoner on the boat who has a treasure map tattooed on his back, but he keeps getting flogged for indiscipline. The guys volunteer to take turns getting flogged in this prisoner’s place, so the map isn’t erased. Sony didn’t want to do it.” Seems like the book has closed on A Knight’s Tale.