Two years after dividing the Star Wars fanbase with his bold creative choices in The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson was met with more universal acclaim for his follow-up movie, Knives Out. A thriller wrapped in a murder mystery, Knives Out is a meticulously crafted whodunit that tricks the audience into thinking they can anticipate the twist, then keeps them guessing up to the intense “In for a penny…” finale.
Although Johnson wrote and directed Knives Out to take a break from franchise filmmaking, it became successful enough to launch its own franchise. Netflix has paid a whopping $469 million for Johnson to complete the Knives Out trilogy with not one, but two sequels. There’s no doubt that Johnson is a great writer and filmmaker, but it seems unlikely that he can come up with two more mysteries that manage to deconstruct the genre, have fun with its traditions, and blow audience’s minds with a donut-hole twist quite like the first one did.
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Since Knives Out grossed over $300 million as an original property in a year that an X-Men movie, a Terminator movie, and a Men in Black movie all failed to cross that box office threshold. So, it’s hardly surprising that the producers with a financial stake in the Knives Out business are eager to bring Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc back to screens to investigate more killings.
The episodic style of classic mysteries, from Poirot to Miss Marple, makes Knives Out easy to turn into a franchise – in theory. As long as Craig keeps coming back and the producers can fill out ensembles of possible suspects with revered movie stars, then they can pretty much keep making Knives Out sequels indefinitely. In each movie, there’s a different murder involving a different group of oddballs like the Thrombey clan, and Blanc comes in to solve the case. In theory, it’s easy to make a movie franchise out of that. But piecing together a mystery that’s as complex and compelling as the original Knives Out is a lot easier said than done.
What worked so well about Knives Out is that Johnson used a lifetime of whodunit consumption to catch lightning in a bottle with the quintessential murder mystery. Johnson has already given audiences his take on the whodunit genre. Returning to that genre – with the same detective, no less – will inevitably feel like a re-tread. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, of course, and Agatha Christie wrote a wide variety of mysteries (one set on a train, one set on a boat, one set on an isolated island, etc.), but not everybody can put a fresh spin on a murder as many times as Agatha Christie.
Johnson had been toying around with the idea of doing a murder mystery for years before Knives Out eventually went into production. Given that Netflix is keen to cash in on its nine-figure investment, Johnson has had to write the sequels on an accelerated schedule. He seems to have been given long enough to come up with a satisfactory plot, but he doesn’t have the years he had to write the first one. This is reminiscent of True Detective, whose hugely acclaimed multi-layered first season was reworked from a novel that Nic Pizzolatto had been chipping away at for years. When HBO wanted a second season within a year, Pizzolatto was forced to rush the process and season 2 ended up being nowhere near as strong as season 1.
One thing’s for sure: Johnson has assembled a star-studded cast to rival that of the first one. Alongside Daniel Craig reprising his role as Benoit Blanc, such beloved A-listers as Dave Bautista, Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Kate Hudson, Ethan Hawke, and Jada Pinkett Smith are signed on to appear in Knives Out 2. Filming is currently underway on the island of Spetses, Greece, and is expected to last until the end of August.
While it conforms to a lot of the genre’s beloved traditions, Knives Out is a brilliant subversion of the expectations of a whodunit. The opening scene gives the audience the misconception that they know what happened to Harlan Thrombey as Marta accidentally gives him a fatal dose of the wrong medicine. As the story unfolds and Johnson reveals a handful of crucial details, the audience realizes they actually have no idea what happened, drawing them to the edge of their seats.
In many ways, Knives Out is an anti-whodunit, or a straightforward thriller crammed into a traditional murder mystery. If the sequels are more traditional or copy the original’s subversions of the formula, they’ll be disappointing. They certainly won’t pack the same surprise as the first movie.
Since Johnson is already shooting Knives Out 2, these back-to-back sequels are well past the development stage. Johnson himself undoubtedly had the same concerns that audiences had about revisiting the Knives Out universe and taking a crack at yet another whodunit, but the fact that he’s currently making the movie would suggest he eventually came up with a story, cast of characters, and final twist to rival that of the original.
Johnson already surprised fans once; it’s only fair to have faith that he can do it again (and again after that), no matter how unlikely it seems. As long as the Knives Out sequels manage to recapture the Blanc character and the first movie’s tongue-in-cheek comic sensibility, they’ll at least be as entertaining as their predecessor.
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