I really enjoyed Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Jr.'s fast and loose take on the classic Sherlock Holmes character, but even I have to admit it was opening a Pandora's Box that I would have rather ignored. Now every classic character or story is up for a "modern" retelling. Arthur trying to pull the sword out of the stone using kickboxing! Cleopatra and Antony engaged in witty repartee. The possibilities are endless, and almost all of them entirely unappealing.
But I'll hold out a smidgen of hope for The Three Musketeers, which Sherlock producer and co-writer Lionel Wigram plans to bring back to the screen by playing up the action and the sex. Variety writes that Wigram has hired screenwriter Peter Straughan to do just that, with an obvious franchise in mind-- Alexandre Dumas, that forward thinker, wrote two Musketeers sequels.
Straughan wrote the screenplay for The Men Who Stare At Goats, a movie that sounded much funnier on paper, but you can debate how much of that was his fault. And while Straughan will obviously have the challenge of making a movie that's actually good, he's not running much of a risk of ruining the characters-- like Holmes, the Musketeers have been adapted and revamped countless times throughout history, and there's not much of an actual canon to be destroyed. Take free reign, Mr. Straughan-- but remember, if you lean as heavily on homoerotic tension as Sherlock Holmes did, you're gonna get called on it.
