Guy Ritchie Admits He’s “Amazed” That ‘Sherlock Holmes 3’ Still Hasn’t Happened

Few Hollywood bromances have aged as well as the one between Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law on the streets of Victorian London. Ritchie’s two films with Downey and Law took Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detective and gave him bare-knuckle brawls, slow-motion fight calculations, and one of the best screen bromances of the modern franchise era. The first film arrived in 2009 and its follow-up, ‘Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows’, came just two years later in 2011, with each one delivering the kind of charismatic, action-packed mystery that had audiences hungry for more.

The two films combined for over one billion dollars at the global box office against a total production budget of just 215 million dollars, proving that the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ franchise is a genuinely profitable one for Warner Bros. Those are numbers that, by any Hollywood logic, should have guaranteed a trilogy long ago. And yet here fans are, well over a decade later, still waiting.

Now, Ritchie himself has weighed in on the long silence around a third film, and his words are both encouraging and bittersweet. Speaking exclusively with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, Ritchie said, “I’d love to. I adore Downey, and I adored making those two movies. Look, I think it’s just honestly a question of just aligning our schedules. I know the appetite for it’s there, but the appetite for it from our side is there, too. So, we’d love to make that happen. I just don’t know how it’s going to happen. It’s amazing that it hasn’t happened.”

Weintraub admitted he has questioned key people involved over the years, including Downey’s wife and producing partner Susan Downey, adding his own disappointment that the project hadn’t come to fruition. Ritchie responded simply with “Me too.” It is a candid moment of shared frustration that many fans will find all too relatable. Susan Downey herself previously noted that scheduling conflicts derailed one serious attempt to get the film made, and that a pandemic-era pause further complicated matters, though she expressed a genuine desire to bring a third ‘Sherlock Holmes’ to the world.

The situation has grown more complicated in recent months. Ritchie is no longer attached to direct ‘Sherlock Holmes 3’, with ‘Rocketman’ filmmaker Dexter Fletcher having been brought in back in 2019, though no meaningful updates have followed since that announcement. Meanwhile, Ritchie has channeled his energy into ‘Young Sherlock’, an entirely separate Prime Video origin series starring Hero Fiennes Tiffin as a 19-year-old Holmes navigating his first murder mystery, set to release in 2026.

Jude Law offered a rare moment of cautious optimism in late 2024, announcing that a new iteration of the script had been completed, though he was quick to note that nothing had formally moved forward. The main obstacle has consistently been busy schedules rather than any lack of enthusiasm, with both Downey and Law having maintained packed filmographies in the years since ‘A Game of Shadows’. With Downey now firmly embedded back into the MCU as Doctor Doom, the window for a reunion seems as narrow as ever.

The game may yet be afoot, but for now it remains one of Hollywood’s most tantalising cases of unfinished business. Share your thoughts in the comments below.