If there are any other fans of Luther out there, you know all too well that you can never be sure if and when another season of the series will drop, but we might be in store for something even better. There have been rumblings of a Luther movie for close to a decade, but Idris Elba recently told Variety that the much-anticipated movie is finally expected to kick off production this September.
We go into production, fingers crossed, in September. I’m so excited about it, it’s been a long time coming. We’re very, very close to pulling the green light on production.
Back in 2018, Idris Elba said that the Luther movie "has all the ingredients to echo those classic [neo-noir] films of the 90s like SEVEN and ALONG CAME A SPIDER and I think what we would like to do is use that blueprint to create LUTHER the film." Elba also added that the big-screen version of Luther will "be more murder, more Volvos, more frowning Luther… essentially we just want to try to take it to a much bigger audience and scale, and perhaps international as well." If you're not familiar with Luther, the BBC series stars Elba as Detective Chief Inspector John Luther, a dedicated and obsessive police officer who often finds himself becoming consumed by the darkness of the crimes he deals with.
The character of John Luther also recently came under fire from BBC diversity manager Miranda Wayland, when she suggested that Luther was not authentic enough as a Black protagonist. "When it first came out everybody loved the fact that Idris Elba was in there — a really strong, Black character lead. We all fell in love with him," Wayland said. "Who didn’t, right? But after you got into about the second series you got kind of, like, okay, he doesn’t have any Black friends, he doesn’t eat any Caribbean food, this doesn’t feel authentic." Idris Elba will next be seen in James Gunn's The Suicide Squad as Bloodshot, which will be hitting theaters and HBO Max on August 6, 2021.