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Netflix's Enola Holmes was released last week as Millie Bobby Brown plays the plucky sister of detective Sherlock Holmes on a mission to track down her missing mother. The film was based on Nancy Springer's books and starred Henry Cavill as Sherlock and Helena Bonham Carter as their mother, Eudoria. While the film has been a smash hit on Netflix, reaching the number one spot on the site, it has landed in hot water with the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate.
The estate of original author Arthur Conan Doyle has filed a lawsuit against Netflix, production company Legendary Pictures, book publishers Penguin Random House and others, including Nancy Springer. The estate owns the copyright for the final ten stories in the series, while the majority are in the public domain. It claims that the final ten stories are the ones in which Sherlock becomes warmer and more friendly, and so it was an infringement of copyright to depict him behaving so in the Enola Holmes film.
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"After the stories that are now in the public domain, and before the Copyrighted Stories, the Great War happened," the complaint states. In World War I Conan Doyle lost his eldest son, Arthur Alleyne Kingsley. Four months later he lost his brother, Brigadier-general Innes Doyle. When Conan Doyle came back to Holmes in the Copyrighted Stories between 1923 and 1927, it was no longer enough that the Holmes character was the most brilliant rational and analytical mind. Holmes needed to be human. The character needed to develop human connection and empathy."
The lawsuit was filed in June and no further developments have yet occurred, and none of the parties involved have commented publicly. Henry Cavill recently appeared in GQ magazine where he was quizzed on the lawsuit, and responded: "Haha, honestly, nothing surprises me anymore. I mean, honestly, I don't have a take on it. It's a character from a page which we worked out from the screenplay, the legal stuff is above my pay grade."
