Ferrel will play Holmes; Reilly will play Watson.
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And this time, according to Deadline.com, the deerstalker-wearing cop and his sidekick will be playing it for laughs with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly are slated to star in the comedy Holmes & Watson. Or does it also require the guidance of Adam McKay, who directed them in both Talladega Nights and Step Brothers? Ferrell, who is coming off the hit Daddy’s Home, is repped by UTA and Mosaic; Reilly, next seen in Kong: Skull Island, is WME and Framework, and Cohen is CAA and Mosaic.
Sherlock Holmes is about to get a lot funnier. Imagining these two putting on convincing British accents is a little hard, but maybe that’s where some of the comedy will come from. Directed by Etan Cohen, Holmes & Watson is inspired by Conan Doyle’s beloved tales but will present a more comic version of the iconic crime-solving duo. Having read the script some years ago, I can tell you that Holmes and Watson is much funnier than Get Hard turned out to be, so hopefully not much has changed in the years since it was in development. But I do remember that Holmes and Watson were not particularly friendly with each other, so we could be looking at another conflict between them akin to Step Brothers, though maybe slightly less childish. While that evidently did not work out, Reilly emerged as a capable replacement. That stalled. The project came back together very quickly over the past few weeks under production president Sanford Panitch and chief Tom Rothman; when scheduling slots opened for all parties, Sony seized the moment. They are planning to go into production right after Thanksgiving.
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In a May interview, producer Joel Silver said he’s trying to get another Sherlock film going with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as early as this fall.
