Knives Out: Three Sequel Pitches for More Benoit Blanc Mysteries

Rian, you can have these ideas for free.

As you may have heard, the knives are coming back out. Casting news has begun to break for the third installment in the Knives Out franchise, and it’s getting me and everyone else very excited. Of course, Daniel Craig is back as the dashing and drawling private detective Benoit Blanc, but that’s not all. Rounding out the cast are:

Kerry Washington, Glenn Close, Jeremy Renner, Josh O’Connor, Mila Kunis, Josh Brolin, Cailee Spaeny, Andrew Scott, and Daryl McCormack. 

Even for a film series that has made its name on massive ensemble casts, this one is especially starry. The sheer wattage of star power verges on parody fan casting. But apart from the buzzing casting announcements, not much else is known about the third film beyond the title, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

Though arguably one of the most original and enjoyable franchises to come out of the last decade, its success is built on a long tradition of murder mystery success. Rian Johnson has stated many times what a fan he is of the murder mystery genre, and his reverence for the form really shows. I’m a big fan of the original Knives Out from 2019, and although 2022’s Glass Onion was not as bewitching, it still had more than enough power to entertain. The morally and spiritually corrupt billionaire storyline felt pretty played out by then, but it was a safe direction to take the sequel and one that satisfied the masses. Overall, not bad for a sophomore effort. 

But, as a die-hard Murder, She Wrote fan, the re-emergence of the campy cozy ensemble murder mystery makes me very warm and fuzzy. I have many treasured memories of watching Jessica Fletcher ride her bike through beautiful Cabot Cove, Maine, tripping over scores of corpses at an alarming rate. There were many years when the only television I was really allowed to watch was PBS, and I would watch the murder mystery nights with my parents and grandparents. Apparently, cardigan-wearing old ladies being professionally nosy really do it for me. Angela Lansbury was my childhood hero, so I was obviously always very popular and cool. Thank you for asking.

Murder, She Wrote ran for twelve seasons, from 1984-1996, an insane run for any program. Agatha Christie’s Marple has had scores of television and film adaptations from the original books over the years and Kenneth Branaugh is also making a run at most movie crimes solved in bringing Christie's Hercule Poirot back to cinemas, with three films under his belt.  

All this to say, if Daniel Craig’s late career trajectory looks anything like that of Angela Lansbury’s, we’re in for many more Benoit Blanc vehicles and I’m going to die very happy. And because I’m invested in the success of this franchise over maybe any other (I love John Wick but Keanu deserves a peaceful retirement), I’ve done some stinkin’ thinkin’ about what future chapters may entail. Netflix and Rian Johnson, I am giving these ideas away for free because I am a fan. Count yourselves lucky.

Here are three pitches for future Knives Out mysteries:

Dead Men Float: Knives Out At Sea

I’ve cornered friends at parties to talk at length about how much I love stories that take place on boats. Based on the font from the teaser alone, I would even put money on Wake Up Dead Man being somewhat nautical in addition to being homicidal. Boats are great, you’re in an isolated and confined location, cut off from the rest of the world with ample opportunity for mischief and mayhem. There’s the tension between the staff steering and running the boat and the passengers, rife with the interclass tension that the franchise continues to mine. What’s more, there’s the tension between man’s will and the will of nature. At any moment, our petty concerns can be overturned entirely by the tempests at sea. Picture Daniel Craig in his best boating attire, creeping around cabin rooms, chasing the killer above deck and below. I propose taking a page out of the Jessica Fletcher playbook and setting the tale on a cruise or crossing Benoit has planned to take with his husband (played briefly by Hugh Grant) to get away from high crimes on the high seas, and a murder finds him anyway. Something like a cross between Death on the Nile and Master and Commander. Throw a sea shanty or two in there for good measure and you have what I think would be a bona fide hit. 

Benoit Begins: The First Knives Out Mystery

This is fairly low-hanging fruit, but every great character needs a great origin story. I’m not a huge fan of the genre and if Furiosa is any gauge, audiences can be pretty tepid on them as well. But look at Prey (2022), Pearl (2022), or The Godfather Part II (1974)! The spoils are there for the taking. Set circa 1980, a preteen Benoit Blanc solves his first crime. We don’t know much about his early life or childhood, but we do know that he is from the Deep South and that his father was also a detective. Here’s how I see it playing out: Benoit’s father is being targeted by a mystery assailant, presumably someone he sent to the slammer or someone close to a past case, and is incapacitated by an attempted murder. This leaves a young Benoit to find and stop the attacker before they can strike again. The twist? The truth will take him deep within the halls of power of his small southern town, forcing him to reckon not only with the mortality of his father but with the moral foundation of the place he calls home. There are tons of tropes and past examples of the format to make a meal out of this story, but what I think would really set it apart is getting the juicy details about what Benoit’s life was like before he fully embraced his destiny as the world’s most famous detective. Does he have a good relationship with his father? Is his mother in the picture? Does he even want to be a detective, or does he find his father’s work gruesome and distasteful? Is he beginning to come to terms with his queer identity as a child in conservative southern culture? You could really play up the time period, as well as a colorful cast of supporting characters to help flesh out the world that made Benoit the man we know he will become. 

Fly By Night: Knives Out Between Friends

This is another idea that gets more at who Benoit is as a character. He gets a letter from an old friend, let’s say she’s played by someone like Sarah Paulson, and drops everything to fly to her side and help solve the murder of her father/brother/significant other. Let’s say the victim was a famous investigative journalist who had fallen on hard times and was yet to deliver a manuscript to their publisher that was rumored to be full of bombshells. She’s desperate to learn who was responsible for the crime, and he’s her last resort. He hasn’t heard from her in years and she hasn’t always been the best of friends to him, but they go way back and he feels compelled to help her. But as the case begins to unravel, and he begins to get closer to both her and the truth, he starts to question what she may be hiding from him. We haven’t seen a metropolitan setting yet, so I would propose a big city like Chicago or Boston that has a lot of rich history as well as a diverse supporting cast to help him solve the case. What I loved so much about the first film was the way it explored the nature of trust. What or who we choose to put our trust in says a lot about us. I think it would be compelling to show Benoit being forced to question whether this person he loves deserves his trust and whether, after all these years of detective work, he’s capable of trust at all. Not only that, we haven’t seen him interact with characters that know him as a person, only ones where he is the outsider. In a way, he’s the greatest mystery of the franchise. There’s a lot to play with in terms of how much we can learn about him, and what about him will always remain secret. I think bringing the story into the world of journalism ties nicely into fertile themes like the nature of truth, the ethics of telling someone else's story, and the ways we twist the facts to tell a story to ourselves.