Exclusive: Idris Elba’s Luther Movie Is Now A Netflix Movie
The Idris Elba Luther movie is finding a new home on Netflix.
This article is more than 2 years old
Idris Elba impressed UK audiences with five seasons on the BBC series Luther. The team behind that series eventually decided to expand their audience with a feature film starring the actor, who is now popular with audiences worldwide. While that movie has been sitting around for a little while, Elba confirmed that the movie will begin filming in 2021, likely in September. After all this time, it seems that the team has decided on a new path for the best way to reach global audiences. Thanks to one of our trusted and proven inside sources, we have exclusively learned that the Idris Elba Luther movie is now moving over to Netflix.
The movie is intended to be something bigger than the original television series, with more of a James Bond feature-film type of feel. Will the move to Netflix change more of the original vision for the Luther movie? Can we expect that the streaming service will mean a different end product? We were unable to learn more information about the reasons behind the decision to bring the Idris Elba film to Netflix. There was a time when moving to a streaming service felt like settling, but these days a lot of major films are being released that way. And as far as the different streaming service options out there, Netflix seems like the right choice for a movie with Jason Bourne elements to it.
The Luther movie, like the televisions series, follows John Luther, a Detective Chief Investigator who looks into murders. He’s a bit of a genius as a detective for murders, but of course, falls into a lot of dangerous situations as he investigates murders with criminals advanced enough to keep them from being solved by your average officer. The movie will have a bigger budget than the television series, making way for more action scenes. Idris Elba is set to star in the movie as well as serve as executive producer.
While our source didn’t have any information on this, it seems fair to speculate that as executive producer and star of the Luther movie, Idris Elba may have used his own Netflix contacts to get the movie moved to the streaming service. With recent delays and the success of other action films on the streaming service, he may have seen an opportunity on the streamer to reach the global audience this project was originally intended for. The actor recently did the movie Concrete Cowboy on the streaming service. It seems to be an emerging theme that once people work with Netflix, they tend to do so again soon.
It also seems to be a trend that big thrillers, mysteries, and action movies are finding a good home on Netflix. We’ve seen this with Extraction and with the upcoming Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot film Red Notice. This may have led Idris Elba and the team to believe that the Luther movie would be in good company on the streamer.
They may have also had concerns about the future of the box office. Netflix is moving forward with production on films these days, while Hollywood continues to struggle to get productions moving again, focusing their efforts on their main projects. Elba has previously expressed that they’ve been waiting a long time to make this movie and want to get started. It seems reasonable to believe that this move meant making the movie sooner and keeping the project a priority, where it may have fallen into the background if they’d worked with a traditional theater.
This move to Netflix seems like a positive thing for the Idris Elba movie. Hopefully, it means that production will get started in September 2021 as promised and that we’ll be seeing the Luther movie soon.
