According to director Rian Johnson, Knives Out 2 will not reveal much about Daniel Craig’s cigar-puffing private detective, Benoit Blanc. The 2019 Whodunnit, Knives Out was certainly lightning in a bottle, exceeding all expectations at the box office, despite releasing in a crowded holiday period with releases like Frozen 2 and Jumanji: The Next Level. Also, with a 97 percent critic’s score and a 92 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s hardly surprising Lionsgate’s CEO Jon Feltheimer confirmed the studio is moving ahead with a sequel, and with Johnson already working on a script and Craig happy to return, a production start is apparently “imminent.”
Along with Craig, Johnson’s Knives Out featured a stellar cast with the likes of Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, and plenty of others joining the murder mystery. The story was set primarily within the Thrombey mansion, where the leader of the family, wealthy crime novelist Harlan Thrombey is found dead due to a suicide… or murder? With a plethora of excellent performances, brilliant writing, and clever twists and turns in a modern setting, the murder-mystery has gone onto surpass $300 million at the worldwide box office with a budget of just $40 million. However, despite the level of detail that the film goes into uncovering information about the Thrombey family, little is known about Craig’s Benoit Blanc. A few bits of information come to light, such as there is a fictional New Yorker article written about him, highlighting his career. But with a sequel in the works, and Blanc’s character once again expected to lead the way, fans still shouldn’t expect to learn a great deal about the private detective.
In an interview with Vulture, Johnson dismissed fan speculation that Knives Out 2 would be somewhat like Indiana Jones 3 and show a young Benoit Blanc becoming the detective he is now. The director highlighted writer Agatha Christie’s novels about Hercule Poirot as an example, stating: “This’ll be another Poirot novel. This’ll be just like what Agatha Christie did.” Johnson also said that the sequel is “disconnected from Knives Out. It’s just another case.” According to the Knives Out director, “little tantalizing details” about Blanc are fun, but with two hours to solve a murder-mystery that has a lot of suspects, “the notion of taking even a few lines of dialogue for him to talk about where he grew up?” Johnson simply said: “I mean, who cares.”
Johnson definitely has a valid argument for why the new potential franchise should steer clear of focusing on its main character’s backstory, as some things are more enjoyable when left to the imagination. Also, with the goal being audiences should enjoy the unraveling of a murder-mystery, it doesn’t seem logical to side-track the story just so audiences can learn more about Benoit Blanc. The statements do also go back to earlier this month when Johnson said the sequel would be another mystery that Blanc has to solve.
Johnson is a director known to test creative waters and “challenge” his audience, but it’s good to know that he will be sticking with certain elements that made the original Knives Out so fun, such as keeping Blanc a mystery within the murder-mystery setting. But regardless of what a sequel has in-store for audiences, with a reported “imminent” start for production, it may not be a long wait to see who joins Craig in Knives Out 2, and what type of case his Benoit Blanc character will have to solve.
Next: Knives Out: 5 Things We Want In The Sequel (& 5 We Don’t)
Source: Vulture
