Sherlock Holmes 3: Everything You Need To Know

8. It Was In The Works Before A Game Of Shadows Came Out

Another reason to be surprised by the fact that Sherlock Holmes 3 has taken almost a decade to reach our screens is that it was actually being worked on before the second movie even hit cinemas.

On 23 October 2011 (two months before A Game Of Shadows opened) Deadline reported that screenwriter Drew Pearce - who, at the time, was writing Downey's Iron Man 3 - had been hired by Warner Bros to script a third Sherlock Holmes movie.

The studio had obviously hoped to put a third movie into production a lot sooner, but as time passed with no significant updates on Pearce's script, that clearly didn't happen. A while later, Pearce began working on Mission: Impossible 5 (which came to be known as Rogue Nation), and as a result, was taken off Sherlock Holmes 3 and replaced by Revolutionary Road scribe Justin Haythe.

Whether or not the current iteration of Sherlock Holmes 3 bears any resemblance to the scripts penned by Pearce and Haythe isn't known. But with the two writers having worked on the project quite a while ago, it's likely that all their material was discarded.