Enola Holmes 2 is a go. Millie Bobby Brown and Henry Cavill will return to reprise their respective roles of Enola Holmes and her elder brother Sherlock Holmes in the sequel, Netflix has announced, alongside writer Jack Thorne and director Harry Bradbeer. Since it’s based on Nancy Springer’s The Enola Holmes Mysteries, there’s plenty more material — five more books to be precise — to adapt here. The first Enola Holmes movie was inspired by the first book, “The Case of the Missing Marquess,” so it’s only natural to assume that the second will draw off the second entry, “The Case of the Left-Handed Lady.”
Of course, given the Enola Holmes book series functions in a similar case-by-case manner akin to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels, there’s no stopping Thorne and Bradbeer from tackling a different adventure. They also have the larger mystery to pay off from the first film, the one involving Enola’s mother Eudoria Holmes, portrayed by Helena Bonham Carter. She’s not confirmed to return just yet, though you would imagine that Enola Holmes 2 will involve her in some capacity. After all, the plot of the first movie was driven by Eudoria being part of a radical suffragette movement.
This is a loss for Warner Bros. Pictures, which originally had plans to release Enola Holmes in theatres but then stepped aside due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Legendary Pictures, the studio that produced it, then sold global distribution rights to Netflix. For the streaming service, Enola Holmes ends up being the franchise that it had hoped it would become. And there was no doubt that there was going to be an Enola Holmes 2, considering the first film was viewed by over 76 million Netflix members in the first four weeks after its release late September last year.
Yes, Netflix’s numbers don’t mean much given it counts watching just two minutes as a “view.” Who here hasn’t stopped watching a movie after seeing the first 5–10 minutes? Netflix will naturally know internally how many of its members actually finished Enola Holmes in full, and it feels comfortable in greenlighting a second young adult fourth wall-breaking period detective drama in its vein.
Enola Holmes 2 is also a win for Brown, who apart from being in the lead, is also a producer on the series. This further cements her relationship at Netflix, where she also got her big break with Stranger Things. Brown will return as a producer alongside her sister Paige Brown, in addition to fellow Enola Holmes producers Mary Parent, Alex Garcia, and Ali Mendes.