Daniel Craig reprises his role as Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion: A Knife Mystery.
We loved director Rian Johnson’s delicious hit movie from 2019 Blades off as much as anyone. So we were eager to learn more about the upcoming sequels commissioned by Netflix. Fortunately, the streaming platform has just released the first teaser for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery — and according to Johnson, it’s less of a sequel and more of a new mystery in its own right with Daniel Craig’s philosophically minded Kentucky sleuth Benoit Blanc. Based on the teaser, it looks fantastic and we can’t wait for the film to release later this fall.
Blades off premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was an instant hit, and word of mouth quickly spread. The film eventually grossed $311 million worldwide – the highest-grossing film in 2019, not based on existing IP. In my review, I praised Johnson’s deft ability to blend dark subjects with a lighter touch in his old-school classic whodunnit: “Think Note meets Murder on the Orient Express— or any number of adaptations of novels by the grande dame of murder mysteries, Agatha Christie — both of which the director cited as influences through a twitter thread from 2019 of movie posters.”
So of course there would be a sequel… or two. Lionsgate originally took on the project, but in 2021 Netflix won a bidding war for the rights to the film plus a second sequel, beating both Amazon and Apple with a whopping $469 million bid. Johnson wrote the script for Glass Onion during the pandemic, especially inspired by the Christie-based “tropical escape” whodunnit Evil under the sun (1982), as well as a 1973 film called The last of Sheila.
Netflix
Craig had forgotten his signature Southern accent since shooting the first film, and instead of trying to wing it, spent a few months working with an accent coach to “make it as grounded and grounded in reality as possible.” Johnson has said that Glass Onion will show Blanc’s perspective a little more than his predecessor; we will meet the new characters through his eyes. According to the official premise:
if Blades off was about the murderous bonds of flesh and blood, Glass Onion makes a good point to be equally wary of your closest friends. When tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) invites some of his loved ones for a getaway on his private Greek island, it quickly becomes clear that not everything is perfect in paradise. And if someone turns up dead, well, who better than… [Benoit] Blanc to remove the layers of intrigue?
In addition to Craig and Norton, the cast includes Janelle Monae as a tech entrepreneur named Cassandra “Andi” Brand; Kathryn Hahn as an ambitious Connecticut governor eager to run for the United States Senate; Leslie Odom Jr. as one of Bronze scientists, Lionel Toussaint; Kate Hudson as a fashion designer named Birdie Jay; Jessica Henwick as Birdie’s assistant, Peg; Dave Bautista as a YouTube star named Duke Cody; and Madelyn Cline as Duke’s assistant (and girlfriend) Whiskey. Ethan Hawke will also appear in an undisclosed role.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery will make its world debut at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10. It will be released in select theaters in November before hitting Netflix on December 23.
List image by Netflix
