A little while back, we told you that one of the projects that currently hot Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr. has been circling was a new version of the classic detective Sherlock Holmes being developed by Guy Ritchie. Well, today the Hollywood Reporter brings news that Downey is currently now in final negotiations to star in the title role.
Filming is scheduled to begin this fall with a projected October 2009 release from Warner Brothers.
The Reporter states that the film hopes to make audiences see “Holmes as more adventurous and less stuffy than previous screen incarnations” and promises to “mine more obscure character traits.”
That sounds like they’re probably going to explore Holmes’ cocaine addiction. In the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, it was mentioned that Holmes sometimes injected cocaine and morphine to alleviate his boredom between cases. This aspect was previously explored in the 1976 movie The Seven Per Cent Solution, based on the novel by writer/director Nicholas Meyers.
