‘Luther: The Fallen Sun’ Heads to Theaters

‘Luther: The Fallen Sun’ will Release in Theaters Ahead of its Netflix

The tough nut copper will have to break out of prison when an old case come back to haunt him and London is threatened by a technological terror.

Idris Elba as John Luther in 'Luther: The Fallen Sun.'

Making the leap from small screen to big can be a daunting prospect. But when you’re John Luther, brought to TV screens by Idris Elba, you tend to face any challenge with your considerable smarts––and willingness to break the rules when you deem it necessary.

‘Luther’ the series, created by Neil Cross, has featured Elba’s tough nut British police detective solving many a case, but frequently crossing the line to do so. And now, for a Netflix film entitled 'Luther: The Fallen Sun,' that continues the story of the show, when we find Luther, he’s languishing in prison.

“He’s done so much to bend the law in order to catch the bad guys that he’s ended up in jail,” Elba tells the streaming service’s TUDUM blog. “That’s where we start the story. This old case that didn’t really ever get solved creeps up back into his life. And John can’t help but find a way to get involved. This bad guy is out there and he has to go out and get him.”

That bad guy is millionaire David Robey, a tech magnate who uses his considerable resources to discover and exploit the dark secrets of others in the service of blackmail.

Portraying Robey in Andy Serkis, who discovered that the character was beyond even what he expected. “I don’t think I’ve come across anything quite as dark for a long time,” he told Total Film magazine, admitting that the script had him asking, “do I really actually at this point in the world and time and my life, want to go down this particular rabbit hole of something that’s so hard to fathom in humanity?”

“Robey really just comes from this tension between morality and ethics,” says ‘Luther’ creator Neil Cross in the same interview. “True morality is the kind of behavior that you exhibit when you know that nobody is watching. But we’ve ceded lots of that private behavior to the semi-private forum of the internet. I’m terrified by the idea that somebody, in fact, is watching.”

The movie––which we now know will be released in select theaters on February 24th, two weeks before its arrival on Netflix’s servers––sees Luther headed outside of London’s grimy streets for snowy pastures new. But the main man is still going to be the person we know…

“Luther’s an unstoppable force,” says director Jamie Payne. “But up to this point, he’s had to tread around the law of the police, because that was his job. Now, he’s a fugitive. This is Luther untethered. This man is so forward in his thinking and is in action. He’s like a wrecking ball, but the smartest wrecking ball you’ve ever met in your life.”