Guy Ritchie’s hit London gangland thriller The Gentlemen looks likely to become a TV series for Netflix.
Ritchie himself is behind the film’s transition from the big screen to the streaming service and it’s believed the adaptation has been on the Netflix radar for some time.
The 2019 crime caper starred Matthew McConaughey as a US marijuana dealer based in London who decides to sell his business, triggering an ugly surge of criminals to emerge from the floorboards and try to take over his business, by foul means not fair.
The Gentlemen featured Hugh Grant is a sleazy Cockney paparazzo with a bad goatee and Michelle Dockery as McConaughey’s Essex girlfriend and from a budget estimated at $22million (£17million) went on to make $115million (£88million) worldwide.
Dockery, intriguingly, is about to star in Downton Abbey: A New Era, which reverses this path by being a hit television series adapted for cinema.
At the time of release, The Gentlemen was reasonably well reviewed, with rogerebert.com saying it ‘was most definitely a Guy Ritchie film, with great little cut-scenes and a brilliant demonstration of British humor (humour?) and sarcasm’, although the likes of The Guardian said behind ‘its wink-wink-nudge-nudge humour is a bitter and dated worldview’.
The Gentlemen is currently available on Netflix and Deadline reports that the TV adaptation of the thriller is part of production company Miramax’s desire to turn some of its back catalogue of movies into series. Another in development is The Henna Artist, based on the bestselling novel and starring Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto.
According to sources, Ritchie co-wrote the pilot episode of The Gentlemen series with Peaky Blinders executive producer Matthew Read and will direct the first two episodes.
The Netflix series will undoubtedly appeal to Snatch director Ritchie’s notion of karma: it was originally pitched as a series before it became a feature film.
There is no news on whether McConaughey, Grant, Dockery or other key cast members such as Colin Farrell, Henry Golding or Charlie Hunnam will appear in the series.
