Guy Ritchie Is Returning to Sherlock Holmes But Not THAT Sherlock Holmes

Good news: Guy Ritchie is finally returning to the world of Sherlock Holmes! Bad news: It is absolutely not for the third installment of his steampunk-esque Sherlock Holmes film franchise starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law we’ve all been waiting forever to see. [Insert long and frustrated sigh here.]

No, instead, Ritchie is both directing and executive producing the forthcoming Prime Video series Young Sherlock, an origin story that will delve into the (future) Great Detective’s formative years. Loosely based on the series of young adult thriller novels by Andrew Lane, the show will see Sherlock as a raw, unfiltered, and undisciplined young man who finds himself drawn into his first case: An unsolved murder at Oxford University. Throw in a little global conspiracy, the very real threat of jail, and a handful of familiar faces like Mycroft Holmes and James Moriarty (who apparently hasn’t grown up to be Holmes’s nemesis just yet), and you’ve got all the ingredients for a brand new twist on a classic tale. And, look, it’s got to be better than that weird Young Sherlock Holmes movie from the ’80s, right?

Hero Fiennes Tiffin, best known for his performance as Hardin Scott in the After trilogy and for his appearance as a young Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, stars as the young Holmes. He’ll be joined by a stacked cast that includes Dónal Finn, Zine Tseng, Natascha McElhone, Max Irons, Colin Firth, and Tiffin’s real-life uncle Joseph Fiennes, who’ll be playing Sherlock’s father.  

“What we’re doing is recreating this character, but before we initially meet him, so it’s about getting the measurements right on how much of Sherlock to put in there and how many glimpses to put in of who Sherlock is going to become, because you want to see him,” Tiffin told Collider. “In any origin story, you want to see how they got to where they are.”

As for Sherlock Holmes 3, well. Hope springs eternal, all that, but the project has been stalled for over a decade while RDJ’s been busy making Marvel movies, and it’s starting to feel like its moment may have passed. The original, Victorian-era-set Ritchie films landed around the same time as the BBC’s popular contemporary take starring Benedict Cumberbatch, kicking off a perfect storm of Holmes-mania that has since largely died down. (No, neither the CBS Watson procedural nor the uncomfortable CW show where Sherlock is maybe a dad count.) 

Young Sherlock will premiere on Prime Video in 2026.