Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel finally has a mysterious title
Johnson's next caper has many crystalline layers to it
Aux News Johnson
In Rian Johnson’s whodunnit Knives Out, a metaphorical donut and donut hole lay out the mystery. For the film’s sequel, another food will guide the way: The multilayered onion. That’s right, the title for Benoit Blanc’s next adventure is Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.
The film is slated to drop this fall and ahead of the release, Johnson once again explains the everlasting influence of Agatha Christie on his work—and the title.
“Something I love about Agatha Christie is how she never tread water creatively. I think there’s a misperception that her books use the same formula over and over, but fans know the opposite is true,” Johnson writes in an announcement on Twitter.
“It wasn’t just settings or murder methods, she was constantly stretching the genre conceptually,” Johnson continues. “Under the umbrella of the whodunnit she wrote spy thrillers, proto-slasher horrors, serial killer hunts, gothic romances, psychological character studies, glam travelogues.”
“When I made Knives Out, that’s what excited me about the prospect of making more mysteries with Daniel as Benoit Blanc—to emulate Christie and have every film be like a whole new book, with its own tone, ambition, reason for being… and (ta dah) title,” Johnson concludes.
Fans of Johnson’s original film now have their own mystery to peel apart, starting with: What the hell is a glass onion? Followed by: Good God, we’re really going with Glass Onion?
Nonetheless, Glass Onion boasts a stellar cast consisting of Daniel Craig as Blanc, alongside Ethan Hawke, Kathryn Hahn, Edward Norton, Dave Bautista, Kate Hudson, Jessica Henwick, Janelle Monáe, and Leslie Odom, Jr. In addition to directing the Greece-set sequel, Johnson also penned the script. Ram Bergman is producing the feature with Johnson.
Glass Onion is expected to arrive in theaters sometime this fall before making its way over to Netflix.
110 Comments
Breakout the donut holes!
But Knives In was right there!
2 Knives 2 Out
Kniveses Out
Electric Stab-a-loo?
Knives Out 2: The Knifening
2 Knives 1 Out?
I kept saying it should really be All Out of Spoons
Knives Out 3: Knie Knives Out Knie
Knives O2t
Out: A Tail of Two Knives
Knife Out
And then 3 coulda been Knivesy Hokey Pokey!
Even More Knives Out
Knives Out: Knifey Spoony(presented by Fast and the Furious, of course!)
Knifey-Spooney
You need to look through one to see how the other half lives.
The bent back tulips?
Please don’t be crap im looking forward to this. – Lucky Luke, Barnsley, United Kingdom, July 2015
counterpoint: this title owns
I like it, too. But more than that, I love that they relegated “Knives Out” to a series name rather than just numbering them.
The Onion I grew up with would NEVER be Glass. Thanks for ruining my childhood!
The Onion I grew up with was paper and guys would grab a bunch of the free copies and then stand outside the Art Institute in Chicago and try to sell them to tourists for $3 each.
The onion I grew up was on my belt, which was the style at the time.
They didn’t have glass onions, because of the war…
The walrus was Rian?
goo goo g’joob
The walrus was Joseph Gordon Levitt, and even though he really committed, you never forgot it was him.
It was Kathryn Hahn, she is behind it all, it was her all along
WRONGIT WAS KANGKANG WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING
Really going to need Chris Evans’ Ransom character in a Hannibal Lecter type situation for this movie.
Spoiler! Now we all know the murderer is Shrek.
Followed by: Good God, we’re really going with Glass Onion?It was good enough for the Beatles.
I get why they did it but calling it A Knives Out Mystery sounds kind of dumb given the title of the previous movie was connected to its mystery. A Benoit Blanc Mystery or something like that would have made more sense. Or just leave it as Glass Onion and assume audiences will understand it’s a sequel from the marketing.
Well, ya know, marketing, but it also calls back to a tradition oddly specific to mystery (and mystery adjacent) stories of “nonsensical sequel titles to connect it to the first one”. See also The Pink Panther (which is the name of the diamond in the first movie) and The Thin Man (which refers to the murder victim in the first movie).
Good point on the Thin Man films! By the third one in the series, most people assumed William Powell was the Thin Man. The actual thin man (the murder victim) is only onscreen for the first couple of minutes of the first film.Movies! ran a Thin Man marathon last week and I watched all six movies back to back. My wife had never seen them. The fist thing she noticed was that pretty much everyone in movies back in the ‘30s and ‘40s was thin.
The fact that James Bond movies never have his name in the title, yet still somehow audiences figure out it’s a James Bond movie, has never seemed to have penetrated anyone’s skulls in Hollywood.
Bond was also an Avengers-level franchise, and had films constantly in the 60s and 70s . It’s safe to assume a film simply titled Glass Onion might have difficulty finding it’s audience amidst the constant stream of netflix additions.
Sure, but Bond movies have a gigantic marketing budget, and every commercial starts off with the iconic Bond music theme, and you hear “Bond….James Bond” a dozen times. No real way to communicate that this is a Knives Out sequel without putting it in the title. (if anything, people are more likely to confuse it for a James Bond movie!)
I’m not a marketing executive, but I’d probably put Daniel Craig in the trailers with his crazy accent, being a detective.
To be fair, the posters invariably have “James Bond” and/or “OO7” in big writing alongside the title. It may yet prove that “A Knives Out Mystery” isn’t officially part of the title either.
They’re going for this kinda thing
If that’s what they were going for, they should have named it after Benoit given he’s the detective that is common between movies. What they’ve done is more akin to giving that book a subtitle of “A Murder of Roger Ackroyd Mystery” or using another famous story title instead of the detective.
Murder on the Orient Express: Death on the Nile
This would actually be great if they just kept stacking. Coming 2024, Hanglider’s End: A Glass Onion Caper: A Knives Out Mystery
Unless Johnson plans to add other detectives to the mix. Then it’s the KOCU.
I agree. Glass Onion: A Benoit Blanc Mystery makes a lot more sense, especially if this is going to be an ongoing franchise—which certainly seems to be the plan. As for there being an actual glass onion… Johnson did have that elaborate knife display in Knives Out, so it’s entirely possible a literal glass onion will serve as the MacGuffin. It’s also set in Greece, a place where onion domes are a part of the achitecture.I don’t really care, as long as we get ourselves some more Benoit Blanc.
The only connection of “knives out” to the mystery was that everyone had it out for each other. That could still be true.
It has been a while since I have seen the movie but I thought it was connected to the guy who was murdered. He was a mystery novelist and I thought one of his novels revolved around the ring of knives that is prominently featured in the movie.
He was a mystery novelist, he does have a big ring of knives that is prominently featured, knives have nothing to do with the mystery.Although Harlan kills himself with a knife it’s one that doesn’t come from the big ring and once the mystery begins, it revolves entirely around poisoning. The knives are just fancy set dressing really (and were conceived that way originally to frame the actors visually during the initial interrogation scene—which, again, occurs before the mystery really kicks off) until the nearly last scene when -SPOILERS-Ransom attacks Marta only to discover the knives in the ring are prop knives anyway.At the climax, Benoit delivers a speech with the line “You’re a pack of vultures, knives out and beaks bloody,” which feels like one of those ‘hey that’s the name of the show’ moments included because people would start wondering why it was called Knives Out in the first place.
I get why they did it but calling it A Knives Out Mystery sounds kind of dumb given the title of the previous movie was connected to its mystery. A Benoit Blanc Mystery or something like that would have made more sense. Or just leave it as Glass Onion and assume audiences will understand it’s a sequel from the marketing.
I wonder if they considered subtitling it “A Benoit Blanc Mystery”. That would have been more Agatha Christie-ish, IMO–associating the stories with the particular detective.
I get why they did it but calling it A Knives Out Mystery sounds kind of dumb given the title of the previous movie was connected to its mystery. A Benoit Blanc Mystery or something like that would have made more sense. Or just leave it as Glass Onion and assume audiences will understand it’s a sequel from the marketing.
Just like the saying goes: people in glass onions shouldn’t throw houses.
I don’t know why anyone’s surprised. Rian Johnson’s whole thing is taking something cliched and saying “But what if we did this instead?”
How’s suprised, and by what? And what cliche is he reworking?
* Who’s
Translation: He’s still drying his eyes (and pants) over The Last Jedi.
He may have meant crochet.
Given that I was hearing about how there are only seven stories as far back as middle school English, I think this might be every writer’s thing.
There’s only four:man vs manman vs naturenature vs naturedog vs vampire
I’ll take Dog vs. Vampires for $200 Alex.
Sold! You now own Universal’s planned film #3 in the Dark Universe series, Werewolf v Dracula: Dusk of Virtue, for $200!
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
You forgot the fifth: plucky dancer vs land developer.
Nah, that’s man v man, just like the “put on a show to save ____” subgenre.
That’s just called writing.
And the creative process in general.
“I don’t know why anyone’s surprised.”
I didn’t know anyone was.
Yeah, and he’s really good at it. Brick, Looper, The Last Jedi. Knives Out doesn’t really do that thought. It’s a modern take on Agatha Christie. “Modern Take on_______” is pretty standard for Hollywood. But Johnson is a great director and talented people want to work for him
The moment Daniel Craig opened his mouth and let that accent out, I thought, “Oh, this is a bit”. Cut to an hour and half later and, ni, that accent was meant to be real. “Funny” only in the sense that watching a dung beetle roll turds into balls is kinda sorta funny when you think about it.I genuinely don’t mean to yuck into other people’s yum, but given the gushing and glowing reviews of this movie I expected something a bit more elevated than what it turned out to be – a less witty, much more self-serious redo/mash-up of ‘Clue’ and ‘Gosford Park’; two far superior movies.
Thank you. I thought I was the only one that watched this and was like “Meh.” Clue did it much better and with vastly superior humour.
“Clue did it much better and with vastly superior humour.”
And God knows there can only be one mystery every fifty years, right?
It was enough that it was an old-school, star-powered murder mystery in the vein of those (I wouldn’t count ‘Clue’ honestly. It’s much more a comedy, and the mystery doesn’t really hold together). And it was an original, not based (directly) on an earlier work.Blanc doesn’t have the appeal of a Poirot or Holmes. I frankly only remember his name because of reading multiple articles about the movie. I’m essentially in for the subgenre, and because Johnson has proven he’s competent in it.
“Blanc doesn’t have the appeal of a Poirot or Holmes.”Sure, but Poirot or Holmes weren’t the renowned icons they are now after their first appearances, either. Not that Blanc is likely to ever reach those heights, but it seems a bit disingenuous to compare a character who’s appeared in one single story, to legendary icons who are over a century old.
Those specific comparisons might be unfair. But what I mean is, I didn’t find the character particularly intriguing. If the lead in this was a completely new character, I’d be equally excited because I’m far more invested right now in seeing what Johnson is going to do than getting more Blanc.
EXACTLY, that’s why some of us are so excited about the series. I just want to watch something new. I don’t need it “elevated” by what’s essentially a brand name.
Lol ok.
Lulz alright.
lel yeah.
Which are knock offs themselves.
Knives Out was far more entertaining and fun than either of those movies.
It’s certainly more entertaining than Gosford Park, which doesn’t technically become a murder mystery until the second half; and even then, it’s no great mystery.Honestly Gosford Park seemed more interested in the lead up than anything else, which makes sense since the writer then went on to make Downton Abbey, which is all fancy hats and parties (note: I have never seen Downton Abbey)
I genuinely don’t mean to yuck into other people’s yumYeah ya do.
I was won over by the critics who said it was so great and you should see it before someone ruins the ending. Then I kept waiting through the credits for whatever they were talking about. It never came.
The movie itself ruins the ending via the grandmother outright telling the viewer early in the film.
I know I’m an outlier but I thought it was the worst film I saw all year and I saw about 30 in that one (2019) including Dark Fate *and* Dark Phoenix.
Honestly, I preferred Dark Fate to Knives Out but I can’t say Dark Phoenix was better than anything.
I loved both Knives Out and Clue… however the one thing that does throw me off is Daniel Craig’s accent. I don’t know why it bothered me so much.
https://genius.com/The-beatles-glass-onion-lyrics
I’m not a star wars fan but honestly the last jedi is a better film than knives out, which was a lazy, smug, stupid waste of time.
Well, it should be called, “Glass Onion: A Benoit Blanc Mystery”, but studios think people are too fucking stupid to know it’s a sequel unless you use the original title in there somewhere.Which is how we got clunkers like “The Lost World: Jurassic Park”
Knives Out is a Radiohead song. Glass Onion is a Beatles song. Maybe there’s a clue there? The walrus was Paul?
Stay tuned for “Send Me Some Lovin’: A Knives Out Mystery”.
Neon Bible: A Benoit Blanc mystery
Well if that pattern continues, I’m 100% positive the next film will be called Whoomp! (There It Is): A Knives Out Mystery.
WAP: A Knives Out Mystery
You win my internet award today. Very hard laugh at that one!
They’re clues to the mystery of whether Rian Johnson is a middle aged white guy. The photo is a spoiler though.
but are we sure that’s actually a photo of Rian Johnson?
Onion bottles, or glass onions, were a shape of bottle used during the 17th and 18th centuries. Onion bottles most commonly were used to hold wine, but were also used for other spirits. At the beginning of the 17th century wine bottles were small and thin glassed, making them difficult to store and ship. During the 1630s, privateer turned inventor Sir Kenelm Digby teamed up with James Howell, creating a method of making stronger glass with hotter furnaces. These early onion bottles, usually referred to as “shaft and globe” bottles, evolved into onion bottle shape by the 1670s. This shape gradually evolved to be stouter with a wide base and short neck, reaching its height at the end of the 17th century before becoming elongated during the onset of the 18th century. Onion bottles achieved their dark green or brown colors from iron oxide found within the sand used to make them. The color was further darkened by the coal used to heat the furnaces, leaving the bottles almost black. Collars were applied to the tops for corks to be tied down. When shipped, they would be laid on their sides to soak the cork and help prevent oxidation of the wine inside. Spirits like brandy were also added to the wine to extend its life when shipping overseas.
I’m patiently over here waiting for Knives Chau.
I would love if GLOW being cancelled meant that Ellen Wong was suddenly free for a million other projects, but sadly that doesn’t seem to be the case (ditto Sunita Mani).
I’m still looking forward to this, but I can’t say it feels like a good sign that they named it after my roughly 150th-favorite Beatles song.
It’s a song explicitly about mysteries and clues, even if it’s just John Lennon having a laugh.
Easily the most fun movie of that whole year was Knives Out, hell yeah I’m looking forward to this.Shame it’s a Netflix movie, but I’m confident I’ll be able to catch it in its brief theatrical window.
So…you don’t know about the Beatles’ song? Or you do, but you just don’t see the connection? I can understand #2, but if #1 is true, I feel old.
A lot of people here moaning about how Knives Out wasn’t clever enough or wasn’t funny enough. It’s exactly the kind of film I think we’re missing these days. Sunday afternoon after a big lunch, everyone can enjoy it and if dad falls asleep… well there’s an explanation at the end to sort it all out for him.Not everything has to be turned up to a hundred. Sometimes something can be gently amusing and that’s OK with me.Of course, I still tie an onion to my belt as was the fashion in my time.
Ugh I just went on a rant about how much I hate film titles with colons in them on the “Paddington in Peru” article. This is the opposite thing. Stop using colons! They’re inelegant!
I wish studios trusted audiences enough to just call the film “Glass Onion” instead of fearing that they wont recognize it’s a sequel by calling it “A Knives Out Mystery”. The issue is that studios don’t think modern audiences are smart enough.
If you’re worried about elegance, lay off the colon (it’s fine), and fire up some anger at that amusement park funhouse/knockoff Harry Potter/headshop typeface they’ve set ‘Glass Onion’ in.
I was really counting on Knives Out, Again!