Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery: Read the script for Rian Johnson’s franchise expansion

Editor’s note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the screenplays of films that will appear in this year’s film awards race.

knife out was always the first of many mysteries for Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to solve. The success of the film in 2019 ensured that it would not be the last, although the sequel, Glass Onion: A Mystery of Blades, appears in a slightly different form. The first of two Netflix-produced movies (after a $450 million deal) glass onion played in theaters for a week in November before hitting Netflix over Christmas weekend.

Writer-director Rian Johnson spent the 2019 press tour and awards ceremony expressing his love of the Agatha Christie mysteries. Coincidentally, Kenneth Branagh brought back Christie’s Poirot for the recent film adaptations of Murder on the Orient Express and dead to zeroe. But Christie’s stories are now historical pieces (she died in 1976), and Johnson wanted to create modern crime novels with ensembles full of memorable characters as suspects. To be knife out Screenplay would receive an Oscar nomination.

The original film introduced southern gentleman detective Blanc, who solves the murder of writer Harlan Thrombey. All his squabbling relatives in New England had a motive. In glass onion, Blanc is invited to a murder mystery party in Greece hosted by tech billionaire Miles Bron. The other guests include Bron’s current and former friends, each of whom has dependent relationships with Bron.

“As we continue to make them, they’re all going to be very different from the last one,” Johnson said in a behind-the-scenes Netflix video.

suspects inside glass onion They include Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), the former partner who banished Bron from the firm; social media influencer Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson) and her assistant Peg (Jessica Henwick); aspiring host Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) and his girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline); Source’s scientist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr.); and politician Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn).

glass onion even lets the viewer guess what crime Blanc is supposed to solve. This isn’t Bron’s made-up mystery game, but which of Bron’s many misdeeds are actually criminal?

“What Hitchcock did so well was realize that while the surprise of the reveal at the end is interesting, it’s not an incredibly dramatically satisfying ending,” Johnson said. “What you really need is thriller mechanics and a real story.”

glass onion grossed $13 million in its theatrical run. It debuted as Netflix’s #1 film over the weekend of December 23 with 82.1 million hours of global viewing. The film has already been nominated for Best Picture at the Critics Choice Awards and Best Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes.

Click below to read Johnson’s script.