Knives Out director Rian Johnson says his next project will be a sci-fi film that harks back to a 1970s era of paranoid thrillers. Update 22nd October 2025: As Wake Up Dead Man approaches its December release, writer-director Rian Johnson has talked again about the science fiction movie he plans to make next. Don’t expect ... Rian Johnson says his sci-fi film harks back to 70s paranoid thrillers
Knives Out director Rian Johnson says his next project will be a sci-fi film that harks back to a 1970s era of paranoid thrillers.
Update 22nd October 2025: As Wake Up Dead Man approaches its December release, writer-director Rian Johnson has talked again about the science fiction movie he plans to make next. Don’t expect anything revelatory about its plot or characters, though – Johnson’s still at the stage where he’s hinting at its tone and influences.
Speaking to Empire, it sounds as though Johnson’s sci-fi film will hark back to the 1970s era that brought us such conspiracy thrillers as The Parallax View, Marathon Man and Capricorn One.
“The most exciting thing right now is this idea I have in my head for the next thing I’m gonna make, and I think ultimately, that’s all you can do, is just kind of follow your nose,” Johnson said. “If I had to define it genre-wise, I’d say it harkens back to the 70s paranoid thrillers. It’s got a light sci-fi element to it.”
For now, we can only speculate over what that “light sci-fi element” might be. Time travel, again, like Johnson’s Looper? One 70s film that mixed sci-fi and paranoia to spectacular effect was Philip Kaufman’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers; maybe Johnson’s working on something similarly unsettling.
Our original story follows…
14th July 2025: Writer-director Rian Johnson’s next murder mystery thriller, Wake Up Dead Man, is out this December, but the filmmaker has hinted at plans to move into a different genre for his next project. In a wide-ranging interview with Rolling Stone, Johnson has suggested that he’s moving back to the high-concept, original sci-fi territory he previously explored in 2012’s Looper.
In fact, Johnson says the idea for the story originally emerged not long after work on Looper was finished.
“I spent several years trying to crack this sci-fi idea that I had,” Johnson said. “Ultimately I could not make it work. I never really got those gears […] to connect. So it just felt like a high concept that didn’t have any innards.”
Instead, Johnson went and worked on a sci-fi film of a different sort: Episode VIII in the Star Wars saga, The Last Jedi. Having spent the past six years in the mystery thriller genre with Knives Out, Glass Onion and Wake Up Dead Man (as well as TV’s Poker Face), he’s now come back around to the concept he had over a decade ago.
“Elements of that ended up working their way into the thing that I’m developing next,” he said. “So, everything comes around.”
One thing that isn’t likely to come back around again in a hurry is Johnson’s long-discussed Star Wars trilogy. Word that he’d be making three further chapters in the series emerged after The Last Jedi came out in 2017, though like so many Star Wars projects, the prospect of it gradually withered as the years piled up. Johnson opted to make Knives Out in 2019, and by the sounds of things, his trilogy never amounted to much more than a handful of ideas.
“I would kick ideas around with Kathy [Kennedy],” he said. “It was all very conceptual. I made Knives Out fairly quickly after. There was never any outline or treatment or anything.”
For now, it sounds as though Johnson’s happier pursuing his own story ideas rather than big franchises – whether it’s another sci-fi film or a further entry in his growing Knives Out series:
“It’s the sort of thing if, down the line, there’s an opportunity to do it, or do something else in Star Wars, I would be thrilled. But right now I’m just doing my own stuff, and pretty happy.”
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is set to open the London Film Festival on the 8th October, after which it will appear on Netflix on the 12th December.
