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Guy Ritchie is making a Sherlock Holmes TV show - and it'll be on Prime Video

Young Sherlock Holmes is returning, minus stop-motion pastries

Guy Ritchie is making a Sherlock Holmes TV show - and it'll be on Prime Video
Andrew Williams
03 June 2024

Are we in a Guy Ritchie renaissance? The British film director has had a new series commissioned by Amazon Prime Video, based on the Young Sherlock Holmes books.

Young Sherlock will be directed by Ritchie, who will also serve as executive producer.

Hero Fiennes Tiffin is set to play the young Sherlock Holmes. The two have previously worked together on The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which received a limited cinema release in April 2024.

Not familiar with the tales of the young Sherlock Holmes? The great detective is 19 years old in these stories, but he still ends up embroiled in dark mysteries.

“At age 19, Sherlock Holmes is disgraced, raw, unfiltered, and unformed, when he finds himself caught up in a murder mystery at Oxford University which threatens his freedom,” reads the show’s blurb.

The book series currently consists of eight novels, published between 2010 and 2015. There’s plenty of raw material with which to work.

This new Prime series will be written by Matthew Parkhill, whose previous writing credits include Primeval, Rogue and Deep State.

“In Young Sherlock we’re going to see an exhilarating new version of the detective everyone thinks they know in a way they’ve never imagined before,” says Ritchie.

“We’re going to crack open this enigmatic character, find out what makes him tick, and learn how he becomes the genius we all love.”

This isn’t the first time a young Sherlock Holmes adventure has made it to screens. There was a movie released in 1985, directed by Barry Levinson and written by Chris Columbus.

It featured a highly memorable and infamous scene where a young Watson hallucinates he is being attacked by an army of stop-motion foodstuffs.

Guy Ritchie is also no stranger to Sherlock Holmes either, having directed the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie starring Robert Downey Jr. and its follow-up Sherlock Holes: A Game of Shadows.

This isn’t the last of the recent Sherlock Holmes news either. Sherlock Holmes 3, the long-awaited follow-up to those two Downey Jr. movies, is apparently still a going concern. Sort of.

“It's still very much alive in our hearts,” Dark Castle producer and wife of Robert Downey Jr., Susan Downey told Screen Rant.

“Every day we talk about, "What is the best next version of that?" Because anytime I see Robert and Jude together, which fortunately, I do get to see a few times a year, we hang out, and I'm just like, "Can I get these guys back on screen together?", it's magic. There needs to be a really strong reason, it needs to be a great story, and we do have some things in the works.”

Could Young Sherlock Holmes spark enough interest for a new movie? Perhaps, but we still have a good long wait for either to hit screens.