Let’s see your best detective impression, folks, because the game is afoot and the biggest mystery to solve concerns exactly what kind of story Rian Johnson will settle on for the sequel to “Glass Onion.” Despite the connective tissue of Craig’s Benoit Blanc solving yet another murder, “Knives Out” and its sequel differed from one another in terms of their tone and structure. With the promise that the third film in this crowd-pleasing franchise will once again march by the beat of its own drum, we can’t help but wonder how it might play out.
Johnson remains tight-lipped on any specifics, naturally, but he at least delivers some insights in the same Empire interview about just how he goes about writing these zany and twisty plots:
“I start structurally. I start working in notebooks. I don’t start with a crime, I start with the structure of the story, and what the audience’s journey is actually going to be through the story. Which has to do with the crime, but more than that, it has to do with who we care about and why.”
This thought process goes a long way towards explaining why Ana De Armas’ Marta Cabrera and Janelle Monáe’s Helen Brand ended up becoming such fan-favorite characters in both “Knives Out” and “Glass Onion,” respectively. Audiences showed up for the A-list cast and the promise of a confounding crime on both occasions, to be sure, but they remained invested because Johnson got most viewers to care about the protagonists caught up in the mystery. However the next film turns out, it’s a safe bet that fans will show up once again looking for another new character to root for.
“Glass Onion” is currently streaming on Netflix.