Guy Ritchie's 128-Minute Murder Mystery Is an Unexpected ...

Guy Ritchie's 128-Minute Murder Mystery Is an Unexpected Streaming Sensation

Guy Ritchie on the set of 'Sherlock Holmes'Image via Alex Bailey/Warner Bros.

By Rohan Naahar Published Feb 19, 2026, 7:54 PM EST Rohan Naahar is a Weekend News Writer for Collider. From Francois Ozon to David Fincher, he'll watch anything once.

He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.

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Writer-director Emerald Fennell is being ruthlessly criticized for her interpretation of Emily Brontë's 19th-century classic Wuthering Heights. Fennell's film, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has divided critics and audiences with its audacious maximalism but has emerged as an early box office hit. It grossed over $80 million in its four-day debut in theaters worldwide, even as the critical consensus was worsening by the hour. Wuthering Heights further establishes Fennell's singular aesthetic, which she gave a glimpse of in her sophomore feature, Saltburn. She broke out with the widely acclaimed revenge thriller Promising Young Woman, which has started to attract backlash in recent years as well. However, she isn't the first filmmaker to experiment with beloved material.

In 2013, her cinematic precursor, director Baz Luhrmann, released a $180 million version of The Great Gatsby starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie grossed more than $350 million at the worldwide box office, but split audiences down the middle for its use of Jay-Z and Lana Del Rey songs in a story set in the 1920s. Also starring Fennell's frequent collaborator Carey Mulligan, along with Joel Edgerton, and Tobey Maguire, The Great Gatsby now holds a 49% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. The aggregator's consensus reads, "While certainly ambitious — and every bit as visually dazzling as one might expect — Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby emphasizes visual splendor at the expense of its source material's vibrant heart." Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, has fallen into "rotten" territory on Rotten Tomatoes for the first time in its run, and is now sitting at a 59% score.

Here's the 'Wuthering Heights' Precursor Running Rampage on the PVOD Market

Another movie that falls in the same category as Wuthering Heights and The Great Gatsby is Guy Ritchie's only successful franchise-starter, Sherlock Holmes. The movie left purists aghast with its bare-knuckle-boxing, drug-addicted version of the iconic British detective, who happened to be played by the fast-talking Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr. Just one look at the film's critical reception illustrates how divisive it was. The critic Robbie Collin called it an "all-fumbling, all-bumbling, all-trundling crock of crud." Mick LaSalle was even more unforgiving. He wrote, "Guy Ritchie is the worst screenwriter in the world, but, to be fair, he is not the worst director. He is only the worst director of the people who actually get to make movies." Nonetheless, Sherlock Holmes was a major hit, grossing more than $520 million worldwide against a reported budget of $90 million in 2010. It inspired a sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and is now charting on Amazon Prime domestically, according to FlixPatrol. A third installment has been in development limbo for a number of years, but Ritchie is working on a new Holmes project with Prime Video's Young Sherlock.

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You can watch Sherlock Holmes at home on PVOD. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.

Sherlock Holmes

Like Follow Followed PG-13 Action Adventure Crime Mystery Release Date December 25, 2009 Runtime 129 minutes Director Guy Ritchie Writers Simon Kinberg, Anthony Peckham, Lionel Wigram, Michael Robert Johnson, Arthur Conan Doyle Producers Joel Silver, Steve Clark-Hall, Dan Lin, Susan Downey