News > WB to Re-Imagine Sherlock Holmes By Giving Him a Sword

If you had to imagine someone to helm a re-imagining of the Sherlock Holmes franchise, who would you pick? Sam Mendes? Christopher Nolan?

How about the guy who did The Descent? 

That's right. Variety reports that Warner Bros. Pictures will produce a (stay with me, here) film adaptation of the comic book re-imagining of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. And Neil Marshall, the man who gave us the unimaginably violent The Descent, will direct it. 

At this point the plot is unknown (the comic book isn't even out yet), but producer Lionel Wigram (who wrote the comic book purely as a tool to get a movie made) told Variety that Holmes will be losing some of his "Victorian stuffiness," generally acting more adventuresome, "including playing up his skills as a bare-knuckle boxer and expert swordsman."

So…they're going to turn him into James Bond? Granted, Holmes was sometimes described as a good fighter in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novels, but you can count the times he actually used force on your fingers.

Obviously, some of the recent re-imaginings we've seen have been pretty damn awesome (Batman Begins, Casino Royale), but only because those films respected the original character while simultaneously deconstructing him and looking at him from a different angle. Will turning the thoughtful, typically nonviolent Sherlock Holmes into a rowdy swordfighter work out? Only time will tell.

This isn't a real poster, by the way, but we thought it'd be nice to do a mock-up of what a sword-wielding Sherlock Holmes might look like in an ad campaign. Our original concept involved him fighting off ninja robots, and the sword was also on fire, but we eventually settled for this far more realistic poster.