The ball finally seems to be rolling on Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes 3, as Deadline reports that writer James Coyne has been hired by Warner Bros. to pen the film’s script; the news comes only a few days after star Robert Downey Jr. confirmed in an interview that production will begin later this year.
Drew Pearce, who worked with Downey on Iron Man 3, was tasked with writing the original draft of the screenplay back in 2011.
Coyne hasn’t worked on many major studio tentpoles of Sherlock‘s size but has written a handful of smaller films over the past couple of years, including Vikingdom and Puncture Wounds. His script for an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Treasure Island landed on 2015’s Black List, and, once upon a time, Ritchie and Holmes producer Lionel Wigram were attached to the project. The current status of the adaptation is unknown, but presumably, it has been, at least temporarily, abandoned.
Downey made his debut as the eccentric detective in the 2009’s Sherlock Holmes and last played the character in 2011’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. While neither film managed to garner as much love as the Benedict Cumberbatch-led BBC show Sherlock, they were major successes nonetheless, raking in a combined gross of over $1 billion worldwide.
For the third installment, on top of Downey, Jude Law will return as John Watson and Rachel McAdams may reprise her role as Irene Adler.
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