MCU star Robert Downey Jr. is set to produce two Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
In addition to Robert Downey Jr., Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films also featured high-profile names such as Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, and Mark Strong. The first Sherlock Holmes made $524 million at the box office on a $90 million budget. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, meanwhile, cost $125 million and went on to make $545.4 million. 10 years later, not much had been heard about a possible Sherlock Holmes 3. However, it has been reported that Robert Downey Jr. will produce two Sherlock Holmes shows. While details on the project are still unknown to date, a Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock TV show is an exciting possibility nonetheless.
Sherlock Holmes has been in films for decades, but the character was never the best choice for leading a blockbuster movie franchise – a fact that made Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock films so successful. While both Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows were entertaining and crowd-pleasing films, they had to focus a lot on the action and the spectacle to justify their respective big budgets and stellar casts. because of Ritchie's approach to the source material, Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock was often more of an action hero than a detective, and that's something the reported Sherlock TV shows he is producing can fix. The TV format is seemingly a good fit for Holmes' character, given the serialized format of Conan Doyle's source material, and can help show a different side of Downey Jr.'s Sherlock. There will be no need for a final battle or squeezing different storylines into a two-hour story, and the focus can be on Sherlock's deductive abilities rather than on world-ending events at every turn.
In 2012, Guy Ritchie's Sherlock films were forced to sit through a difficult comparison with the BBC's Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman managed to translate the essence of the Conan Doyle's stories while also engaging all sorts of demographics in a way that Downey Jr.'s Sherlock films never did. One of the reasons for BBC’s Sherlock's success was precisely the format chosen: 90 minutes serialized episodes, three episodes a season, and only four seasons released. That's not to say Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock shows should copy BBC’s Sherlock formula to the letter, but rather that the TV format, especially on a streaming platform, offers much more flexible possibilities as to where to take the character and the story.
The reported Sherlock Holmes TV shows can build on Robert Downey Jr's movies and help to consolidate his version of pop culture’s most famous detective. Thanks to the current era of TV and streaming, what might not have been possible 10 years ago on the small screen in of budget and cast is now much more feasible. While it remains to be seen what exactly those two Sherlock Holmes TV projects are and whether Robert Downey Jr. will star in any of them, they remain a tantalizing proposition at this juncture nonetheless.