Daniel Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc returns to screens this year with “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” a third and potentially final (at least for now) film in the murder mystery series.
Speaking to Rolling Stone recently, the film’s director Rian Johnson says the new movie is tonally very different to the second movie “Glass Onion” which went in a more campy and lighter direction compared to the first.
Johnson has long cited Agatha Christie as the inspiration for these films – the first being a family-centric manor mystery and the second more akin to one of her travelogue stories.
The third one, which ties to a church in some way, appears to be something more akin to her darkest stories with a bit more of a gothic horror tone:
“It’s incredibly different from Glass Onion. We put out a teaser trailer a month ago. It’s much more a Gothic, much more grounded tone. It’s more similar to the first one in that way. It kind of gets back to the real origins of the genre, which, predating [Agatha] Christie, go back to [Edgar Allan] Poe.
…After three years of working on something that has a particular tone, it’s like you’ve been eating the same thing for lunch every day for three years. I’m more excited about doing something that feels new… It’s not so much a conscious decision. In order to keep it exciting for myself, I don’t want to repeat myself.”
Johnson adds he’s open to the idea of doing more installments in the series, but there’s no concrete concept for it at present: “I don’t have something in my head right now… but I would keep doing them as long as I can.”
Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack and Thomas Haden Church star in the film which releases on Netflix in December.
