Guy Ritchie News

Hot on the heels of the tremendous success of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, Warner Brothers has been digging through the DC Comic archive looking for some new cash cows. This time, they pulled an odd choice- Lobo. Not ringing any bells? What if we said this was Guy Ritchie's next project?

Ritchie has been somewhat of a hot commodity these days, and we'll be seeing the fruit of his latest efforts with the Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law vehicle Sherlock Holmes later this year. After having suffered several previous years being married to Madonna and making a slew of lackluster films after his last hit, 2000's Snatch, Ritchie deserves a second chance.

So, it's only natural that WB, after working with Ritchie on Sherlock, feels comfortable handing the director a project about an alien bounty hunter that looks like a reject from Kiss, who comes to earth in search of four alien fugitives “bent on wreaking havoc”. Yeah, I don't know either. Luckily for WB, they've secured Ryan Reynolds for the Green Lantern project.

I can say this- I do remember seeing Lobo on comic book shelves in the 80s and 90s, and Ritchie's style could be a good match for the larger-than-life badass character, but reports are coming in that the studio is targeting a PG-13 rating. That's clearly to secure extra box office revenue, but I wonder if the kids in that age bracket will really jump for this film, let alone be satisfied with a toned-down version. However, if Nic Cage's Ghost Rider can do well these days, I don't see why Lobo shouldn't.

I guess we'll have to see how Sherlock Holmes does first. Holmes hits theaters this Christmas.

Guy Ritchie's latest movie is RocknRolla.

In it, Gerard Butler stars as One Two, the leader of a group of thieves and thugs known as the Wild Bunch. The British director recently spoke to ComingSoon.net about the project:

When you start writing a movie like this, where do you even begin? Do you start with one idea and just see where it leads you?
Yes, I think you start off with one idea and gradually, it gathers momentum with the sort of organic process of gathering other ideas that feel as though they belong in the same milieu I suppose. Then eventually one thing leads to another, and another thing leads to another and then ultimately the frame for the canvas is the environment, so London became the canvas and the paint became all the characters on that, so that the template was London.

Gerard Butler stars in RocknRolla.

Ritchie also touched on his future movie with Robert Downey Jr., based on a certai iconic detective...

Sherlock Holmes is an interesting choice for you, being only really your second adaptation.
What I wanted to do is I wanted to be an aggressive filmmaker the next five years and try and do as many films as I could within that period and "Sherlock Holmes" just seems like the perfect segue, because it's English. At the same time, it's backed by Warner Brothers and it has an American audience and it's a big action movie, so it has all the ingredients of fifty percent of what I'm known for and fifty percent of what I'm not known for, but it's fresh, fertile ground for me and I like action frankly. I never really had any money to exercise some major action sequences and now I do and I have rather high falutin' ideas, too.

Guy Ritchie - the writer/director behind RocknRolla - recently spoke to USA Today about his impending Sherlock Holmes movie, which will star Robert Downey Jr.

The film will be based on Lionel Wigram's comic book, as the new Holmes is expected to be more adventuresome than ever, taking advantage of his skills as a boxer and swordsman. We weren't even aware he possessed those skills.

"It will be a very big production, visceral and intellectual," Ritchie told the newspaper. "His brilliance will percolate into the action."

The movie, scheduled for release in 2010, will be set in the olden days, Ritchie said. However, the emphasis will be as much on Holmes' physical prowess as it is on his keen powers of deduction.

"His intellect was as much of a curse as it was a blessing," the director added. "He was a deeply layered character."