Though Charlie Hunnam is about to ride off into the sunset with the final season of his FX series Sons of Anarchy this fall, the actor has emerged as director Guy Ritchie's top choice to play the title character in Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur. We reported last month that Idris Elba is playing Bedivere, the right-hand man of Arthur's father who teaches the young man how to fight and how to lead an army.

Charlie Hunnam is in final negotiations for the project, which will be the first in a series of six movies that we first reported on back in January. Joby Harold (Edge of Tomorrow) wrote the script for the first movie, which lays the groundwork for this epic six-movie franchise. No story details have been released thus far.

Warner Bros. has been trying to make a King Arthur movie for several years, starting with a 2010 project that Guy Ritchie was slated to direct from a script by John Hodge (Trainspotting). The studio was also developing David Dobkin's Arthur & Lancelot for quite some time, which had Kit Harington (Game of Thrones) and Joel Kinnaman (The Killing) set to play the title characters. However, the $120 million budget was deemed too high, and the project was shelved.

Other incarnations involved a project starring Colin Farrell as Arthur and Gary Oldman as Merlin, a new version of Excalibur that Bryan Singer was once attached to direct, and another take from Donald De Line that was compared to the Harry Potter franchise.

Charlie Hunnam, who was once attached to play Christian Grey in Universal's steamy adaptation Fifty Shades of Grey, will next be seen in Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak and Pacific Rim 2. King Arthur will reunite him with his Pacific Rim co-star Idris Elba.