Did Tarantino force Guy Ritchie's hand into SHERLOCK HOLMES?

By Matt Holmes /

About this time last year, it was announced that Guy Ritchie was to remake the classic World War II movie THE DIRTY DOZEN at Warner Bros and as recently as May, that producer Joel Silver had also benchmarked him to direct an adaptation of the war hero comic book character SGT. ROCK. Though when Quentin Tarantino finally got his act together at Cannes some weeks later and announced that he would have his World War II epic complete in 12 months, Warner Bros. put on hold both adaptations and gave SHERLOCK HOLMES to Ritchie as it was further in development and didn't want to slug it out with Quentin. Dark Castle producer Susan Downey updates the status of both projects to Coming Soon...

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"Those two projects specifically, they still need more work in development...I know that Guy, he still has passion for them, but his focus right now is on this. I do believe that if there was a universe where he could be doing them all right now. He would want to, and we haven't jumped off him and looked for other people yet either. I'm not exactly sure what we're going to do, because we love those projects but they have to be done right, which is the other reason why we haven't moved forward even with him, because we've got scripts that were good but they hadn't landed just yet."
SHERLOCK HOLMES opens Nov. 20th 2009.