What's Coming Up for the Knives Out Cinematic Universe?
Will there be a fourth and fifth Benoit Blanc movie? Rian Johnson answers this question.
As you all know, the third Benoit Blanc film is coming out, later this year. It’s called Wake Up Dead Man. We have production photos. We have a trailer. And we have… the urge to get ahead of ourselves!
What I, and I’m sure many others, want to know is: is this the final installment of Benoit Blanc’s adventures? Do we only get three stories? Daniel Craig’s turn as James Bond brought us five films… can we get some of that action?
Rian Johnson, the films’ writer and director, has acknowledged this possibility.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone’s legendary film critic Alan Sepinwall, Johnson says he’s open to it. He remarked,
“I feel great! Because I have genuinely taken a swing each time that I didn’t think would work,” he said of potential future films. “Ultimately, that’s the thing you’re trying to avoid. The second you feel like you know how to do this, that leads nowhere good. So I feel fantastic. And with the movies, we can keep doing that. I don’t have something in my head right now. You kind of burn the ship into the sea each time and ask yourself, ‘How will I make anything ever again?’ But I would keep doing them as long as I can.”
You hear that??? “I would keep doing them as long as I can.” Thank GOD.
Stay tuned for more of our Knives Out series coverage!
Olivia Rutigliano
Olivia Rutigliano is an Editor at Lit Hub and CrimeReads. Her other work appears in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham's Quarterly, AirMail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Baffler, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Politics/Letters, The Toast, Truly Adventurous, and elsewhere. She has a PhD from the departments of English/comparative literature and theatre at Columbia University, where she was the Marion E. Ponsford fellow. She hosts the podcasst "Culture Schlock" at Lit Hub Radio. She is on instagram at @oldebean, twitter at @oldrutigliano, and bluesky at @oliviarutigliano.bsky.social.
