Amazon Greenlights Guy Ritchie's 'Young Sherlock'

Rumors have been circulating for a while that director Guy Ritchie would be returning to his feature film world of Sherlock Holmes, especially since the star of his film series, Robert Downey Jr., gave an interview talking about how the script got caught in development hell after the success of the first two movies. It turns out, however, that the reported moves by Amazon Studios, which might have potentially revived the third installment, were actually for a different project. Amazon's Prime Video announced Ritchie will be directing a new Sherlock project, set in the same sort of world, for the streaming service, but not a movie. Instead, it's a TV series, with Hero Fiennes Tiffin cast as Young Sherlock.

Not unlike the successful Enola Holmes films over at Netflix, Young Sherlock is based on a series of novels aimed at the YA crowd. (Though we should note the Enola Holmes books are more middle-grade reading than Young Adult if we're being accurate.) The Young Sherlock Holmes books, however, are true YA thrillers, written by British author Andrew Lane, which take Arthur Conan Doyle's famous sleuth and rewind the clock to the 1860s, when Sherlock Holmes was a student first at prep school and then at university. The series was inspired by the success of the Young Bond series (which one can only imagine Amazon is doing its best to convince the Broccoli family should also be greenlit).

Thus far, there are eight Young Sherlock Holmes books, the first of which starts when Sherlock is all of 14. However, with 26-year-old Fiennes Tiffin in the lead role, one imagines the character will be aged up to his late teens at the very least, if not his early 20s. After all, Ritchie films are not exactly known for being family-friendly.