Rian Johnson weighs in on whether we could see a Benoit Blanc-focused holiday special or even a Muppet crossover.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is performing very well indeed for Netflix. The whodunnit sequel to 2019’s Knives Out enjoyed a brief run at select cinemas before debuting on the streaming platform, making something of a splash too. In its first week, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery has been viewed for a combined 127.25m hours, already making it the third most watched Netflix film of all time (behind Red Notice and Don’t Look Up).
Netflix already has a deal in place for a third film in the series, but with the movie landing strong critical reviews as well as big viewing numbers, we can imagine the company is keen to branch the franchise out into new areas. Director Rian Johnson has been chatting about a few of the ideas that have gained traction online, including a crossover with The Muppets or a Knives Out Holiday Special.
As far as the Muppets idea goes, Johnson conceded during a Q&A on Netflix’s TUDUM blog that he had given the idea some serious thought before ultimately finding it to be too problematic. “It’s a joke that I thought was pretty brilliant, and I ended up really giving [it] some serious thought,” he says. “As much as I take the murder mystery genre seriously, I take the genre of a Muppet movie seriously… I think those two things have very different rules. You can either have a Benoit Blanc mystery that has Muppets in it, but they’ll feel out of place. Or you can have a Muppet movie that Benoit Blanc is in, but it’ll feel like a Muppet movie.”
So whilst that particular idea might not have legs, Johnson did seem to be taken with one fan’s suggestion on Twitter that a holiday special would be the way to go, in the style of Marvel’s recent Guardians Of The Galaxy Holiday Special. Johnson’s reaction was short and simple as you can see below, but who knows what wheels may now be turning in his mind?
OH SHIT https://t.co/dL8ewWyziK
— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) January 3, 2023
Johnson he revealed that he’s now in the very early stages of putting together the next film in the series, stating “It’s such a weird time right now because I’m just starting to work on writing the next mystery movie, and it’ll be a few years before it comes out and God only knows what the landscape’s gonna look like at that point. I feel like trying to guess where we’re gonna be next is maybe a fool’s errand.”
Glass Onion certainly had a distinctly different tonal feel to its predecessor and you can imagine that Johnson will be keen to explore fresh directions with the next film, even if those directions probably don’t lead to Muppets.
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