While it always takes years to make a new animated offering, we were beginning to wonder what was happening with the follow-up to 2011’s musical garden ornament adventure Gnomeo And Juliet. It lives! And now Johnny Depp is lending his voice to the title character in Sherlock Gnomes{
James McAvoy and Emily Blunt are back as our heroes from the first film, which saw them as gnomes from two warring families in different gardens finding love. They enjoyed a slightly happier ending than their Shakespearian inspirations and this time are still united, investigating a string of vanished garden gnomes. For help, they’ll have to turn to the legendary detective Sherlock Gnomes.
The film, which has Kung Fu Panda director John Stevenson on board to get it made for Paramount (in place of Disney from last time) has a script by Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley, who wrote the original, with Ben Zazove crafting the most recent draft. And Elton John and David Furnish remain attached as producers, though there’s no indication yet whether the new movie will have the same level of music as the original. We’d bet on ornaments belting out a few tunes, though. Sherlock Gnomes is aiming for a January 12, 2018 release in the States.
As for Depp, he’s back on our screens in Black Mass on the 27th of this month and has Wonderland sequel Alice Through The Looking Glass arriving on May 27 next year.