The 2009 Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law hit sits at number five on the chart, per FlixPatrol data cited by Collider, alongside F1 and The Accountant.
Sherlock Holmes, the 2009 detective film that turned Robert Downey Jr. And Jude Law into an unlikely bickering duo, has landed back inside Apple TV's global top 10, sitting at the fifth spot according to FlixPatrol data cited by Collider.
That puts Guy Ritchie's period mystery alongside current chart regulars like F1, Mayday, The Gorge and The Accountant, on a service that increasingly rewards films long after their theatrical runs end.
Ritchie has become something of a streaming specialist without really trying to be one. His most recent theatrical release, In The Grey, starring Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal, didn't exactly set the box office alight but has stuck around on streaming platforms and video charts for months since. His Sherlock spinoff series Young Sherlock, with Hero Fiennes Tiffin playing a nineteen-year-old version of the detective, has built its own following. And Ritchie's fingerprints are all over Tom Hardy's gangster series MobLand too, where he directed multiple episodes.
None of that quite explains why a seventeen-year-old film is suddenly climbing charts again, but Ritchie's current visibility and the run of his other projects seem to be pulling old fans back toward the original.
The 2009 film, of course, needs no reintroduction for anyone who grew up on it. Downey Jr.'s Holmes was a scruffy, hyperactive brawler rather than the deerstalker-and-pipe archetype audiences expected, and he leaned into the manic energy that was making him a star in Iron Man around the same time. Law's Watson gave as good as he got, and together the two actors built a genuine push-pull chemistry that critics singled out as the film's strongest asset even when the plot, involving Mark Strong's occultist villain Lord Blackwood, got a little overheated.
It worked commercially in a big way. The film pulled in $524 million worldwide, landed two Oscar nominations and took home a Golden Globe for Downey Jr. Rotten Tomatoes has it sitting at 69%, respectable rather than rapturous, but audiences clearly didn't need critical consensus to keep coming back.
Ritchie made a sequel, A Game of Shadows, in 2011, and a third film has been talked about on and off for years without ever quite materialising. Whether this streaming resurgence nudges that project back into motion is anyone's guess. For now, Holmes and Watson are back doing what they do best, quietly outlasting everyone who counted them out.
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