Proposal: They Should Make Sherlock Into Movies

The fourth season of Sherlock came and went, and it’s altogether possible that there won’t be a fifth one, because Benedict Cumberbatch is a huge fucking movie star now, and Martin Freeman isn’t far behind. These are busy men, and getting them together with creators Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss (who pulls double duty playing Mycroft Holmes, who is the most gloriously dickish character on television… I wanna grow up to be Mycroft) for this past season was something of a minor miracle already.

So, after a finale that (no spoilers) could have easily served to wrap up the whole show, fanboys like me have to sit around and hope they scrounge up enough time and money to do a fifth season, presumably years from now.

But I have a better, almost-certainly unoriginal idea, which is that they should just scrap TV altogether and make Sherlock into a movie franchise. I know there’s been talk of a third Robert Downey Jr. Holmes movie, but fuck those movies. They’re shit. Cumberbatch is Holmes. He owns that role like he owns MY HEART. His Holmes deserves to be immortalized on the silver screen.

The series is already structured like film anyway. All you get is three lousy episodes a season, each one running over 90 minutes long but at an impossibly breakneck pace. (Example: Two characters jump out of a window to avoid a bombing and then, in the very next scene, are back in action utterly unscathed.) In other words, they shoot three action movies at a time for TV.

So why not make those TV movies actual movies? They’d get a bigger budget, which means they’d be able to pay the boys enough to free their schedules up. In every other respect, Gatiss and Moffatt wouldn’t have to change a fucking thing. They could use the same sets, and side characters, and cool little graphic farts and wipes they use for the TV show. An episode of Sherlock is a delirious, self-contained affair, with a single case wrapped around a greater, ongoing mythology. That’s no different from any current franchise movie. The transition would be seamless. And I would not be sitting here all alone, waiting for my DREAMSLEUTH to return.

Make some goddamn movies, gentlemen. I wanna watch Mycroft insult more people.