If Netflix wants to make a billion dollars, all it needs is convincing writer and director Rian Johnson do movie “Knives Out” starring the Muppets, as well as Daniel Craig as the flamboyant detective Benoit Blanc. There's just one problem: Johnson doesn't seem particularly interested.
“It's not a bad idea,” he said recently. Hollywood Reporter when asked about Internet Darling Fan casting “Knives Out”. “But I love and respect the Muppet movies too much. The reality is that if you put the Muppets in a Benoit Blanc movie, it would be completely wrong because they would be killed off. The alternative is to just put Benoit Blanc in a Muppet movie, which admittedly would be a lot of fun, but in some ways it would break the reality of what Blanc is.”
Here's the thing, though: Johnson is wrong about the dolls. And, having watched his latest part “Knives Out” and “Benoit Blanc”, Wake up, dead manI think he might also be wrong about his own films. (And before you mention it, yes, I saw Sesame Street: Knives Out sketch. But Sesame Street and The Muppets are two completely different things with completely different tones, so I'll ignore that for this article.)
If you look at the entire 70-year history of the Muppets franchise, not only does it become obvious that the Muppets can do almost anything, but it also becomes clear that a deadly detective mystery has been in their DNA from the very beginning. The Muppets got their start on late-night television shows and commercials. In both cases, creator Jim Henson often relied on comedic violence to tell fast, flashy stories.
“In the early days of The Muppets, we had two endings,” Henson once told a biographer. Stephanie St. Pierre. “Either one creature ate the other, or they both exploded.”
A case in point is that the Muppets' first appearance on late-night television was a segment on The Jack Parr Show in 1963, where an early version of Kermit wearing a long blond wig was eaten alive by a skull-shaped puppet. Henson's first commercial featuring the Muppets was coffee advertisement where two lumpy creatures attack each other with cannons and other weapons. Years later, when Henson decided the Muppets deserved their own TV show, his first attempt was a 25-minute special called The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence.
The fact is that the dolls were very cruel and harsh from the very beginning. The tone of the franchise has changed over the decades, especially since Disney bought the characters in 2004, but the potential is still there. After all, if self-proclaimed cat Sabrina Carpenter may star in new The Muppet Show specialthen why can't Kermit and Fozzie Bear help Benoit Blanc solve a terrible murder?
What about Knives Out? Is a detective series really elastic enough to include the Muppets without breaking? Based solely on the first two articles in the series, I would say no. 2019s Knives out And 2022 Glass bow Both are elaborate murder mysteries wrapped in biting socio-political commentary. These are movies in which famous actors deliver dialogue that reads like Twitter memes while an energetic detective slowly unravels a complicated murder.
Both films are characterized by complex, multi-layered narratives that twist and fold in on themselves. Glass bow half the runtime is spent revealing that one of the main characters – spoiler alert – has in fact already died and has been secretly replaced by her identical twin, cleverly changing the meaning of everything we've already seen on screen. It's the kind of meticulous storytelling that admittedly wouldn't work as well if there were puppets running around the screen shouting their fuzzy little heads. (Even if the physical comedy in these films sometimes borders on Muppet territory.)
So maybe it's good news for Muppet fans that Wake up, dead man abandons much of what previously seemed to characterize Knives Out. Of course, the murder still takes place and Benoit Blanc still shows up to solve it, but that's where the comparisons end. Johnson's focus here is turns his franchise into gothic horror and the study of religious faith.
As a result, it eschews much of the political commentary and experimental storytelling in favor of flashy visuals and some truly creepy jump scares. (When I saw Wake up, dead man in the theaters, the Knives Out fan sitting to my left was clearly unprepared for a horror film and barely survived the experience.) And while there are a few more clever twists, none of them really measure up to what we've seen in Blanc's previous outings when it comes to pure detective work.
So if Knives Out can be a horror movie and still be Knives Out, then why not make a Muppets movie? Nothing about Johnson's franchise or the dolls themselves really stands in the way, other than the fact that Netflix and Disney may not be in the mood to share their intellectual property. But assuming the lawyers can work it out, I don't see why the next installment of the mystery series couldn't feature Benoit Blanc sharing the screen with Miss Piggy. Perhaps then he will finally meet his match.
