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Adaptations in other media

In 2012, Guinness World Records listed Holmes as the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history, with more than 75 actors playing the part in over 250 productions.

The 1899 play Sherlock Holmes, by Conan Doyle and William Gillette, was a synthesis of several Conan Doyle stories. In addition to its popularity, the play is significant because it, rather than the original stories, introduced one of the key visual qualities commonly associated with Holmes today: his calabash pipe; the play also formed the basis for Gillette's 1916 film, Sherlock Holmes. Gillette performed as Holmes some 1,300 times. In the early 1900s, H. A. Saintsbury took over the role from Gillette for a tour of the play. Between this play and Conan Doyle's own stage adaptation of " The Adventure of the Speckled Band ", Saintsbury portrayed Holmes over 1,000 times.

Holmes's first screen appearance was in the 1900 Mutoscope film, Sherlock Holmes Baffled. From 1921 to 1923, Eille Norwood played Holmes in forty-seven silent films (45 shorts and two features), in a series of performances that Conan Doyle spoke highly of. 1929's The Return of Sherlock Holmes was the first sound title to feature Holmes. From 1939 to 1946, Basil Rathbone played Holmes and Nigel Bruce played Watson in fourteen U.S. films (two for 20th Century Fox and a dozen for Universal Pictures) and in The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes radio show. While the Fox films were period pieces, the Universal films abandoned Victorian Britain and moved to a then-contemporary setting in which Holmes occasionally battled Nazis.

The character has also enjoyed numerous radio adaptations, beginning with Edith Meiser 's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which ran from 1930 to 1936. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce continued with their roles for most of the run of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, airing from 1939 to 1950. Bert Coules, having dramatised the entire Holmes canon for BBC Radio Four from 1989 to 1998, penned The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes between 2002 and 2010. This pastiche series also aired on Radio Four and starred Clive Merrison as Holmes and Michael Williams and then Andrew Sachs as Watson.

The 1984–85 Italian/Japanese anime series Sherlock Hound adapted the Holmes stories for children, with its characters being anthropomorphic dogs. The series was co-directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Between 1979 and 1986, the Soviet studio Lenfilm produced a series of five television films, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The series were split into eleven episodes and starred Vasily Livanov as Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Watson. For his performance, in 2006 Livanov was appointed an Honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire.

Jeremy Brett played the detective in Sherlock Holmes for Granada Television from 1984 to 1994. Watson was played by David Burke (in the first two series) and Edward Hardwicke (in the remainder). Brett and Hardwicke also appeared on stage in 1988–89 in The Secret of Sherlock Holmes, directed by Patrick Garland.

In the 2004–2012 Fox 's show House, the titular character Gregory House is an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes in a medical drama setting. The two characters share many parallels and House's name is a play on Holmes' one.

The 2009 film Sherlock Holmes earned Robert Downey Jr. a Golden Globe Award for his portrayal of Holmes and co-starred Jude Law as Watson. Downey and Law returned for a 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays a modern version of the detective and Martin Freeman as a modern version of John Watson in the BBC One TV series Sherlock, which premiered in 2010. In the series, created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, the stories' original Victorian setting is replaced by present-day London, with Watson a veteran of the modern War in Afghanistan. Similarly, Elementary premiered on CBS in 2012 and ran for seven seasons until 2019. Set in contemporary New York City, the series stars Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as a female Dr. Joan Watson. The series was filmed primarily in New York City, and, by the end of season two, Miller became the actor who had portrayed Sherlock Holmes the most in television and/or film.

The 2015 film Mr. Holmes starred Ian McKellen as a retired Sherlock Holmes living in Sussex, in 1947, who grapples with an unsolved case involving a beautiful woman. The film is based on Mitch Cullin 's 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind.

The 2018 television adaptation, Miss Sherlock, was a Japanese-language production and the first adaptation with a woman (portrayed by Yūko Takeuchi) in the signature role. The episodes were based in modern-day Tokyo, with many references to Conan Doyle's stories.

Holmes has also appeared in video games, including the Sherlock Holmes series of eight main titles. According to the publisher, Frogwares, by 2017 the series sold over seven million copies.