Every Version of The Gentlemen

An original, not an adaptation

Guy Ritchie did not adapt The Gentlemen from anything. He wrote the original screenplay and directed the 2019 film as a standalone creation: the story of Mickey Pearson, an American drug baron selling off his high-end cannabis empire while rivals circle and secrets surface, came from no prior novel, comic, or play. That makes the franchise genuinely unusual. There is no source text to argue about, no faithful-versus-loose adaptation debate. What exists instead is a single creative vision Ritchie liked enough to revisit: a 2024 Netflix series set in the same criminal ecosystem, handing the lead to an entirely new cast while keeping the style, the class anxieties, and the violence intact.

The story spans exactly two screens. Beyond that, the world lives in the cultural conversation around it: the long tradition of British crime capers that Ritchie helped define with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000), and which The Gentlemen both nods at and updates for a slicker, more self-aware era.