Idris Elba’s John Luther May Soon Kick Your Teeth in On the Big Screen

Among the list of five bleak British television shows I recommended two days ago was the intense and brutal “Luther,” a BBC cop show that follows Idris Elbas’ complicated and troubled detective John Luther as he attempts to solve serial killings. Of the five shows on that list, “Luther” is probably the most immediately accessible and the one that feels most like a film, albeit a film that is several hours long and broken up into chapters. It makes sense, then, that “Luther” creator — Booker-prize winning novelist Neil Cross (who was also a writer on another one of those bleak British shows, “MI:5″) — is envisioning a feature-film version at the end of the next series run.

“We’ll wrap up Luther as a TV show, but I think we’ll then probably make the leap to the big screen with John Luther.” … Speaking about how the series will end, the writer added: “The final scene of the final episode is great and we wouldn’t want to continue. I love an ending. I have a weakness for a powerful and moving ending. We’ll go out big and leave it at that.”

This is one of the rare television-to-film moves I can fully support, and a movie itself wouldn’t look that different from the television series, which is typically broken up into two-hour installments following a different serial killer. It would also afford Elba the break-out role he hasn’t quite been blessed with yet, though his turns in Prometheus and Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Pacific Rim may instead give Elba the prominence to carry a Luther film toward bigger box office success.

Either way, it’s poetic justice for Elba, who was replaced by Tyler Perry in James Patterson’s Alex Cross detective series last year because, as the producer of the films explained: “Idris is a great actor [but] Tyler Perry is a phenomenon.”

I’ll take a great actor over a phenomenon any day, thank you very much.

(Source: Radio Times)