It’s been five years since the release of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and though Guy Ritchie’s sequel paled in comparison to its predecessor, it was a huge hit at the box office — such is the power of Robert Downey Jr. The sequel’s success pretty much ensured a third installment (which was officially confirmed earlier this year), and with today’s news that WB has created a writers’ room for the project, it seems that Sherlock Holmes 3 is a little closer to becoming a reality.

Ritchie and Downey Jr. have been a bit preoccupied since 2011: The former was locked into a lengthy production on his new King Arthur movie, and the latter is, well, he’s Iron Man. But it seems the pair — along with Jude Law — finally have some time to get the band back together for another Sherlock Holmes sequel.

Per Variety, WB is following the lead of Transformers and Universal’s forthcoming monsters universe by creating a writers’ room for Sherlock Holmes 3. The studio has hired Gary Whitta (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story), Nicole Perlman (Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain Marvel), Justin Malen (Dwayne Johnson’s Baywatch movie) and Kieran Fitzgerald (Snowden) to crack the story for the new sequel. Absent from the roster is James Coyne, who was hired to work on a new draft of the screenplay earlier this year.

You don’t typically fill an entire writers’ room to work on one sequel, however, so it would seem as though WB is taking steps toward potentially expanding the franchise with additional sequels. But according to Variety, that’s not so, as a source claims this is “a rare case in which a room is being set up for just one film,” with the studio hoping to save themselves some time in the usual development and rewrite process.

That sounds like WB is putting this one on the fast track — last we heard, they hoped to begin filming by the end of this year, but it’s highly unlikely that the script will be finished in time, and with Robert Downey Jr. shooting Avengers: Infinity War early next year, late 2017 seems like a more reasonable start date.

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