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“Everyone is in danger,” Daniel Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc proclaims in the action-packed teaser trailer for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. The film, coming to Netflix on Dec. 23, is a sequel to 2019’s popular murder mystery Knives Out, which introduced Craig’s sly detective.
“The phrase I kept coming back to and talking about the first movie is, ‘It’s a roller coaster and not a crossword puzzle,’” writer, director, and producer Rian Johnson said in an interview with Netflix’s Tudum. “It’s a common mistake in writing whodunits, thinking that you’re making a crossword puzzle, and that the fun is that the audience is actually going to analyze all this and figure it out.”
Alongside Craig, Glass Onion stars Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline, Kate Hudson, and Dave Bautista. The film follows a group of wealthy friends who receive a mysterious set of invitations to a reclusive millionaire’s private island.
Johnson told Tudum he was inspired by Agatha Christie for the story. “The reality is that what makes something successful is a story, and that’s true of a whodunit as well: Are there characters that you care about? Are you pulled through emotionally? Are you on a ride with them with this story?” Johnson said. “Then the revelation of it all coming together and the whodunit, and the fact that it is all layered in there, is part of the fun of the genre. But, in a way, it can’t be the spine that actually is supporting the body of the whole thing. You just need a good story.”
The film was officially announced earlier this year. “Something I love about Agatha Christie is how she never tread water creatively,” Rian Johnson wrote on Twitter ahead of the official title announcement. “I think there’s a misperception that her books use the same formula over and over, but fans know the opposite is true.”
He added: “It wasn’t just settings or murder methods, she was constantly stretching the genre conceptually. Under the umbrella of the whodunnit she wrote spy thrillers, proto-slasher horrors, serial killer hunts, gothic romances, psychological character studies, glam travelogues.”
