Sherlock Season 5 Won't Hit Until 2020 If Ever

As the Tom Petty song goes, "the waiting is the hardest part." If you're a fan of Sherlock, you're going to be be doing a lot of that according to Mark Gatiss, the showrunner and actor that plays Sherlock's brother, Mycroft Holmes. In an interview with RadioTimes.com

Oh even longer, we have no immediate plans, everyone's very up for it but I think it's just terribly difficult to schedule everyone. It's just so hard to get everyones diaries to align. And there's always the Faulty Towers principle, just leaving it as it is, equally if in a few years time we all came back and said "Should we do another one?" I think that everyone would be very happy to do so..."

Last month Andrew Scott who plays Sherlock's nemesis Moriarty said, "I don't think there's another series of Sherlock coming soon. I think another General Election would come first! We're not doing [Sherlock] for another couple of years. Everybody got quite busy, you know? You want to keep it fresh and stuff like that."

With all that said, Benedict Cumberbatch didn't exactly give any real hope for another season with his interview in Variety where he said this:

"It might be the end of an era. It feels like the end of an era, to be honest. It goes to a place where it will be pretty hard to follow on immediately. We never say never on the show. I'd love to revisit it, I'd love to keep revisiting it, I stand by that, but in the immediate future we all have things that we want to crack on with and we've made something very complete as it is, so I think we'll just wait and see."

Benedict Cumberbatch does have quite a line up of films coming up for him in the next 2 years. According to his IMDB profile there are 11 films that are in different levels of production or that have been announced. That's not counting all the time that the MCU promotions will take from his schedule. Now that Martin Freeman is in the MCU, at least we might be able to see the two on screen together.