After iconic director Guy Ritchie turned a movie into a hit TV show with Netflix's The Gentlemen earlier this year, the film-making powerhouse looks set to strike gold again with the announcement that another of his movie franchises is getting the TV treatment.
This new series is called Young Sherlock, which will show the younger version of the classic character than we saw in the 2009 movie Sherlock Holmes and its sequel A Game of Shadows, also directed by Ritchie.
Ritchie will direct some of the series and also serves as executive producer, but the main showrunner is Matthew Parkhill who co-created Deep State and individually created Rogue. It's also set to be adapted from a book series called Young Sherlock Holmes, written by Andy Lane.
While Robert Downey Jr. played the lead as the adult Holmes, this younger version will fall to Hero Fiennes Tiffin, who you may recognize from The Woman King, the After romance series and Harry Potter where he played a young Tom Riddle.
The rest of the cast hasn't been announced but in the Sherlock Holmes movie, he's already acquainted with his stalwart partner John Watson, so we could meet a young Watson too.
While Young Sherlock hasn't explicitly been called a prequel to Sherlock Holmes, the announcement says it has "all the wit and charm of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes features", implying that it'll be linked to the movies in spirit if not in plot.
Young Sherlock's plot has been described: it's set to depict a 19-year-old Holmes as he investigates his first case: a murder at Oxford University. He is apparently "disgraced, raw, unfiltered, and unformed" and will have to learn on the job as he finds himself caught up in a large conspiracy.
Unlike The Gentlemen, Young Sherlock isn't a Netflix show; instead, Ritchie is joining back up with Amazon, which has released many of his recent movies including The Covenant as well as The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre in the UK.
Amazon has confirmed that Young Sherlock will land on its streaming service Prime Video and will consist of eight episodes, though no release date has been announced so far.
If you're a really keen Holmes fan, you'll be happy to know that a third movie is said to be in the works, but it's apparently stuck in development hell due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Guy Ritchie isn't helming this; it's being directed by actor and director Dexter Fletcher who also made Rocketman, Ghosted and Eddie the Eagle.
