20 facts you might not know about 'Sherlock Holmes' (2009)

Lionel Wigram, an executive at Warner Bros., started thinking about how he wanted to depict the character of Sherlock in new ways. Wigram saw him as being more of a “bohemian” character. The producer left Warner Bros. in 2006, and after a decade of thinking about his idea, he set out to try to put it into action.

Instead of writing a full script, Wigram wrote out the plot out his idea for a Sherlock Holmes film as a story. Then, he had British artist John Watkiss draw a 25-page comic book out of his story. Wigram got the movie going at his old stomping grounds Warner Bros., and he got a "story by" credit for his troubles.

In Victorian England, spiritualism was a big movement. This inspired Wigram when crafting his story. The villain, Lord Blackwood, was inspired partly by English occultist Aleister Crowley. Wigram also liked the idea of the almost supernatural Holmes facing a villain who was purportedly actually supernatural.

First up to direct Sherlock Holmes was Neil Marshall. However, Marshall would not end up directing the film. Instead, the job went to Guy Ritchie, best known for action films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrel and Snatch.

Ritchie spent a part of his childhood at a boarding school in England. When there, the school would play Holmes stories over the dorm speakers. When he was a kid, Ritchie was lulled into sleep by Holmes stories and wanted to pay homage to the “authentic” Doyle stories with the film.

When people started seeing trailers for Sherlock Holmes, there was a lot of consternation about all the fighting. Well, the people who worked on the film were prepped for that. Wigram and Ritchie spoke extensively about how often Holmes gets in fights or uses physicality to get out of a sticky situation being included in the Doyle stories. “A lot of the action that Conan Doyle refers to was actually made manifest in our film,” said Wigram.

Downey found out about the project while visiting producer Joel Silver with his wife, producer Susan Downey. His wife said that Holmes is “quirky and kind of nuts,” which suited the actor. At first, Ritchie wanted a younger actor, thinking of Sherlock Holmes as a Batman Begins-type film. In the end, the director went for it.

Downey lost weight to play Sherlock at the advice of Chris Martin from Coldplay. He also got into practicing martial arts because a martial art called “Baritsu” had been mentioned in one of Doyle’s stories. The actor had played Charlie Chaplin once, so he felt comfortable with a British accent. Here, he excelled. Actual Brit Ritchie called Downey’s accent “flawless.”

Ritchie had to be convinced to go with Downey, and Jude Law wasn’t the first choice to play Watson either. The director initially pictured Russell Crowe in the part. We don’t know why Crowe didn’t play Watson, but it was Law’s role in the end.

Law was a fan of Sherlock Holmes and was happy that Watson was going to be more of a true colleague to Holmes in this film as opposed to Nigel Bruce’s well-known turn alongside Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock, wherein Bruce played more of a bumbling sidekick. Law wrote down phrases from Doyle’s stories so he could insert them into his dialogue. The actor also had some practice in this world. He had been in an episode of the TV show The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Like Bruce’s Watson, Inspector Lestrade is typically depicted as bumbling and always two steps behind Holmes. Ritchie’s film makes him a capable police officer. The biggest difference from the Doyle stories is how Irene Adler is handled. She appears in one Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” where she outsmarts Holmes and forever earns his admiration (and romantic interest). Here, Adler returns, and it is intimated the two had, um, consummated their relationship.

Much as the Joker is nodded to at the end of Batman Begins, the end of Sherlock Holmes introduces Sherlock’s greatest nemesis, Professor James Moriarty. For this film, he only exists as a voice, and Andrew Jack voices him. Jared Harris plays Moriarty in the sequel. For the home release and the edited-for-TV version, Jack’s voice has been replaced by Harris’s.

Sherlock fights Blackwood’s French henchman (a French hench, as it were) Dredger at one point. Dredger is played by Robert Maillet, a legit seven-footer who used to be a professional wrestler under the name Kurrgan. While Maillet has plenty of experience pulling punches, he accidentally connected with Downey’s face. It was reported at the time Downey was knocked, but fortunately, that was not true. He was bloodied and knocked down, though. Maybe at that moment, he regretted the whole “let’s make Holmes a fighter” thing.

In his stories, Doyle never referenced Sherlock wearing a deerstalker hat, though he did reference hats that could have been deerstalkers in theory. This led to later illustrators going that route, and the minute Rathbone wore one, it became indelibly attached to the character. Ritchie did not want his Holmes wearing a deerstalker. Downey decided he wanted his Sherlock to wear a beaten-up fedora instead.

Hans Zimmer, a legendary film composer and Oscar winner, provided the score to Sherlock Holmes. One of the instruments he used was an out-of-tune piano he bought for a couple of hundred bucks. He liked the “quirkiness” the piano provided.

Sherlock Holmes never goes out of style. The movie made $62.4 million domestically during its opening weekend. All in all, it would make $209 million domestically and $524 million worldwide from a budget of $90 million. It finished as the eighth-highest-grossing movie of 2009. However, it did that while never being the top movie at the box office. The reason? When it hit theaters, Avatar was still going strong en route to becoming the highest-grossing movie ever.

Sherlock Holmes was nominated two times over by the Academy Awards for Best Art Direction and Best Score (that piano paid off for Zimmer). It didn’t win. On the other hand, Downey won a Golden Globe for Best Actor – Musical or Comedy.

Holmes and Watson would return in 2011 with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. This is where Harris stepped into the role of Moriarty. It kind of proved to be a plateau for the franchise. The film made $543.8 million worldwide, effectively the same box office as the first movie, but with a budget of $125 million.

Immediately after A Game of Shadows was released, there was talk of a third film. In 2011, Drew Pearce was hired to write the script. Since then, writers and potential directors have come and gone, and shooting and release dates have been pushed repeatedly. In 2019, director Dexter Fletcher was hired, and December 22, 2021, was given as a release date. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and there hasn’t been an update on the project.

The Downeys have talked about wanting to turn Sherlock Holmes into a franchise. That includes future films, spinoffs, and TV series. Robert and Susan have said they were influenced by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which they are obviously both familiar with. Two TV shows were put into production at HBO Max in 2020, but there hasn’t been an update in a while.