'Sherlock Holmes 3' Might Take Place In The Old West

It's been almost a decade since we've seen Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law's John Watson share the big screen in 2011's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, but Warner Bros. is still interested in bringing them back to complete the trilogy. They've set a new release date for Sherlock Holmes 3 in 2021, and now a new report says that the pair could be leaving London for the sequel and heading to the American Old West.

Learn more about the possible Sherlock Holmes 3 setting below.

HNEntertainment says that Downey and Law's iterations of Holmes and Watson will be saddling up and heading to the Old West. They say the Sherlock Holmes 3 setting "is expected to be the Old West in the United States, specifically San Francisco, California."

Most of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes stories are set between 1880 and 1914, a period that encompasses several years of what we all refer to as "the Old West." For reference, 2009's Sherlock Holmes, the first film to pair Downey and Law in their roles, takes place in 1890, while A Game of Shadows was set just a year later in 1891. There's no mention of whether or not there will be a time jump in this sequel, but Jude Law previously indicated that we would see a significant leap ahead in time:

"We hope to propel the story forward," Law said last summer. "As always, the essence of the story is their codependency. We're going to examine — since it's been several years since we've seen them — we're going to play up the fact that they haven't seen each other for a long time either." The second movie ends with Holmes camouflaging himself as a piece of Watson's furniture and sneakily adding to his friend's story, so it's conceivable that Holmes may have snuck out of the house and the two of them haven't seen each other ever since.

HNEntertainment speculates that Sherlock Holmes 3 might include characters like famed magician Harry Houdini or law enforcement agent William J. Burns (both of whom were friends of Doyle's in real life), but there's no hard evidence yet to support this speculation. In any case, this would be a nice change of scenery for both the character and director Guy Ritchie, who has never directed a film set in the Old West before.

Sherlock Holmes 3 is rumored to begin filming in January of 2020 and is currently scheduled to hit theaters on December 22, 2021.