What's (Not) Happening With The 'Sherlock' Movie

There's a lot of talk of Sherlock going around right now, partially because the series' third season just wrapped airing in Britain and just started airing in the US, and partially because it's a day of the week and this is the Internet. Amongst that general chatter — you can check out our review of "The Empty Hearse" here — entered one word that echoed through the caverns of the Sherlockverse everywhere as we all leaned in to hear what followed. That word was "movie," more specifically executive producers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat on if Sherlock had a possible future as a feature film.

Gatiss and Moffat, for their parts, are open to the idea: When asked by Entertainment Weekly recently, Moffat said that “[He and Gatiss] don’t rule anything out.” But I wouldn't start foraging through Fandango for tickets quite yet: The chances of it actually happening seem slim.

Sherlock, as it is, doesn't really need a movie. It's got two big movie stars, sure; Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch have skyrocketed to fame since the series' first episode aired, but each episode of the show is already an hour and a half long, with production values your average film would would envy.

Because of the schedules of the two leads and the fact that Moffat runs another show that shoots more than three episodes every couple of years, they can arrange shooting to be whenever best fits for all of them. It's really kind of a perfect situation for them, and Moffat followed his free-wheeling statement with as much:

There’s something quite special about the fact that it’s on television, starring those two. That wasn’t the case in the beginning. Mark [Gatiss] and I sometimes imagine what would happen if we had written it now and were saying, ‘We’d like Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman for the parts!’

The people behind Sherlock buckle down and churn out what's basically a high-quality miniseries roughly every two years; people might spend that same amount of time in pre-production, principle photography, and post-production for one ridiculously high-budgeted feature film. Sherlock doesn't even need to be a feature film in order to have showings on the big screens of movie theaters: They already do that whenever they damn well please, and people will show up.The instinct to want to "elevate" a television show through giving it a feature is understandable; but some TV shows don't need — or want — to be anything than what they are. Image: BBC