Immediately the new film “Enola Holmes” has just been announced by Netflix that it is attacked by the Conan Doyle Estate, the rights holders of the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. According to them, the version of the character of Sherlock Holmes which appears there corresponds to that present in the stories which do not yet fall into the public domain and therefore are protected by copyright.
Will portraying a character soon be punished? The beneficiaries of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work, the Conan Doyle Estate, have just sued the next Netflix film, Enola Holmes. The most famous creation of the British author, the character of the detective Sherlock Holmes (and what is attached to him), is in the public domain today. Other authors can therefore reinvent it and adapt its adventures at leisure… unless these covers have an ounce of resemblance to a tiny portion of the Sherlock Holmes stories still protected by copyright in the USA. And according to the Conan Doyle Estate, this is indeed the case with Enola Holmes. In the latter, Sherlock Holmes (played by Henry Cavill) and his big brother Mycroft (Sam Claflin) help their younger sister Enola (Millie Bobby brown) to conduct his first police investigation. The first images of this previously unknown film were revealed this Thursday, June 24 (below).
Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes have a younger sister — and this September, she’s taking her first case.
Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, and Sam Claflin star in Enola Holmes pic.twitter.com/etnfJLArFm
— Netflix (@netflix) June 25, 2020
To begin, Enola Holmes is not an invention of Arthur Conan Doyle but of the American writer Nancy Springer. The latter has already dealt with the Conan Doyle Estate and emerged as a winner. Several judgments were made in favor of his work at the end of the 2000s, since most of them included elements of the intrigues of Sherlock Holmes today in the public domain. However, despite the fact that the Netflix film is a direct adaptation of the written (and supported by justice) accounts of Nancy Springer, the Conan Doyle Estate considers that it borrows too much from the few novels published between 1923 and 1927, still protected until ‘in 2023. Indeed, in Enola Holmes, the character of Sherlock would show empathy towards the members of his family and especially respect towards his sister, a woman. According to the beneficiaries, these very precise characteristics belong to the Sherlock Holmes of the period 1923-1927 and not from the one before, in the public domain.
Not as “basic” as it sounds
To justify this ultra-picky argument, the Conan Doyle Estate explains that the First World War, during which the famous author put his work on hold, radically changed Arthur Conan Doyle and his character. In their complaint, the assigns point out that the author lost his son Arthur Alleyne Kingsley and his brother Innes Doyle there. Therefore, they claim that the author then took the “Surprising artistic decision to give a heart to Sherlock Holmes” and make him express a “Deep respect for women.” The plaintiffs even illustrate their argument by taking extracts from pre-war stories where the detective is explicitly execrable with his friend and assistant, Watson. In summary, the Conan Doyle Estate accuses Netflix, Nancy Springer, its publisher Penguin Random House and the film production company, Legendary, of take back precisely the post-war Sherlock Holmes without their authorization and ask for financial compensation in the New Mexico court in the United States. Note that the Conan Doyle Estate had tried to do the same without success against Miramax for its film Mr. Holmes, with Ian McKellen playing the detective when he retired in 2015. The saga of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, however, had not been touched. A third opus is also in pre-production and should be released in December 2021.
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