Guy Ritchie has been pushing into the world of TV for a minute now—possibly because the world of film has been increasingly comfortable rejecting him of late. (Take this as your reminder that Ritchie hasn’t had a genuine hit since Aladdin, journeyman work that had the full weight of the Disney machine behind it, and recent movies like The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre have been outright bombs.) In TV, though, Ritchie is the producer of the relatively well-received, well-watched Netflix adaptation of his own The Gentlemen, and now he’s branching out, with Paramount+ announcing a March 30 premiere date for his new series MobLand.
The cast list for which is a quick reminder of one of the reasons Ritchie might do so well in television: A deep Rolodex of extremely famous people willing to come star in a streaming series under his leadership, with MobLand set to star heavy hitters like Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren. The extremely vague logline for the series suggests that it’ll at least start out centered on Brosnan, as the head of an organized crime family “who is fighting for power within a global crime syndicate.” (That being said, you probably don’t lure Tom Hardy into a TV show to keep him in a supporting part.) The series started life as a spin-off of Showtime’s Ray Donovan, of all things, before someone apparently decided to strip the Jon Voight vibes from the whole project and rebrand it as a standalone series.
It’s not clear yet what role, exactly, Ritchie will fulfill as executive producer on the series: For The Gentlemen, he provided story and screenwriting credits on multiple episodes, and directed the show’s first two installments. It remains to be seen if he’ll repeat that cinematic tone-setting here. (As to writing, The Donovans was announced as being written entirely by Top Boy‘s Ronan Bennett, who’s still listed as an executive producer in press materials; it’s not clear, at present, if the de-Ray Donovan-ing of it all led to a shakeup for the show’s writing credits.) In addition to Hardy, Brosnan, and Mirren, MobLand is also set to star Paddy Considine, Joanne Froggatt, Lara Pulver, Anson Boon, Mandeep Dhillon, Jasmine Jobson, Geoff Bell, Daniel Betts, Lisa Dwan, and Emily Barber.
