Has Guy Ritchie Quietly Become TV’s King of Crime?

Guy Ritchie has spent nearly 30 years making cinema look cooler than it probably has any right to. Fast cuts, faster dialogue, expensive tailoring, complicated criminals and at least one bloke who looks like he knows where to dispose of a body.

But here’s the strange thing. Guy Ritchie might now be having the best run of his career on television.

And September could prove it.

The Gentlemen Season 2 arrives on Netflix on September 3, bringing Theo James, Kaya Scodelario, Ray Winstone and Vinnie Jones back for another round of aristocrats behaving extremely badly. This time Eddie and Susie are expanding their criminal empire beyond Britain, including a rather glamorous excursion to Italy. Hugh Bonneville, Maya Jama and Chris Eubank Jr are among the new arrivals.

Netflix is clearly confident. It has already ordered Season 3 before Season 2 has even aired.

That confidence isn’t difficult to understand. Season 1 pulled in 75.9 million views during the first half of 2024, making it Netflix’s fourth most-watched English-language series during that period.

But The Gentlemen is only part of the story.

Over at Paramount+, MobLand paired Tom Hardy with Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren and became the platform’s second most-watched original series ever, attracting 26 million viewers according to Paramount. Season 2 arrives just two weeks after The Gentlemen, on September 18.

Then there’s Prime Video’s Young Sherlock. Critics were divided, but audiences definitely turned up. Amazon says the first season reached 45 million viewers in its first 28 days, placing it among Prime Video’s ten biggest original seasons ever. Season 2 is already filming, with Ritchie returning to direct the opening episode.

Netflix. Paramount+. Amazon.

Three different streamers. Three Ritchie shows. Three renewals.

That’s quite a run. Of course, saying television has been more successful than Ritchie’s movies needs one enormous asterisk. This is still the director of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Sherlock Holmes and a little Disney movie called Aladdin that made more than $1 billion worldwide. Cinema has been very good to Guy Ritchie.

But recently his movie output has been far less predictable. Films including Operation Fortune, The Covenant, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Fountain of Youth and 2026’s In the Grey have ranged from great fun to slightly forgettable.

TV, meanwhile, seems almost purpose-built for him.

Ritchie creates worlds rather than just stories. Gangsters, families, hierarchies, rivalries and bizarre supporting characters need space to breathe. Give him eight or ten hours instead of two and suddenly all those side characters who might have disappeared after three scenes get their own story.

And he isn’t abandoning cinema. Wife & Dog, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Rosamund Pike and Anthony Hopkins, is currently scheduled for February 2027, while he has also reunited with Jason Statham and Vinnie Jones for Viva La Madness, now in post-production.

So perhaps Guy Ritchie hasn’t swapped movies for television. He’s simply discovered that the bigger the playground, the more fun he can have. And right now, television is giving him the keys.