If we are living through the Murder Mysterenaissance right now – with shows like Only Murders In The Building and The Afterparty, and films like Kenneth Branagh's Poirot mysteries and See How They Run lighting up our screens – then consider Rian Johnson the genre's Leonardo DaVinci. Having dazzled us with the one-two punch of 2019's Knives Out and last year's star-studded sequel Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, as well as Natasha Lyonne-starring Columbo spiritual successor Poker Face, the man behind some of the greatest murder-mystery works in recent memory has finally given us word on his plans for the third Benoit Blanc movie.
Whilst speaking to The Wrap about buzzy new erotic thriller Fair Play, a product of the Emerging Filmmaker Program at Johnson and long-time producing partner Ram Bergman's T-Street production company, the Brick filmmaker revealed that he's hard at work on his next Knives Out project. "It’s coming along," Johnson said when asked for a progress update on the project, which will mark Daniel Craig's third outing as everybody's favourite Foghorn Leghorn-accented gentleman sleuther. "I obviously couldn’t work during the strike, and now that it’s over, I’m diving in full force, and so it’s coming along. I’ve got the premise, I’ve got the setting, I’ve got what the movie is in my head. It’s just a matter of writing the damn thing,” he shared.
Following the rapturous critical and commercial response to Knives Out, which saw Craig's Benoit Blanc trying to solve the murder of noted murder-mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), streaming giant Netflix swooped in to buy the rights for two follow-ups under the A Knives Out Mystery moniker for an eye-watering $450 million. The first of those follow-ups, Glass Onion, which saw Blanc embroiled in another murderous plot at the private island getaway of eccentric billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), clocked up an impressive 359.8 million viewing hours within the first 28 days of its release – which our scientific mathematical analysis tells us is, like, proper loads actually.
Whilst we don't know when the third instalment in Johnson's Knives Out trilogy will drop, who will be in it (beyond, presumably, Craig), what it will be about, or indeed where it will be set, our skills in the art of deduction lead us to suspect it will be well worth the wait. And crucially, whilst RJ has previously said a Muppets cross-over isn't imminently in the works, he also hasn't totally ruled it out either. So a Miss Piggy murder-mystery could still happen - and we already have the perfect strapline: Who Smoked The Bacon? We'll get our people to talk to your people, Rian.