Rian Johnson says third Benoit Blanc movie will be 'very, very different' from 'Glass Onion'

Good news, murder-mystery fans! Audiences won't have to wait very long for the return of Daniel Craig's charming Southern sleuth, Benoit Blanc.

Catching up with Empire for the magazine's March 2023 issue (now on sale), writer-director Rian Johnson revealed that the third outing with Blanc is next on his production schedule, "because it's the most exciting thing to me right now," he explained. "That's served me really well. I feel like any movie I'm making, I need to be making it because I can't imagine doing anything else. I'm jumping into the next Benoit Blanc because I can't think about another story."

The forthcoming entry in the subversive whodunit franchise will premiere on Netflix, which scooped up a pair of Knives Out sequels (the first of which, Glass Onion, is now streaming) for an astonishing $450 million in March 2021. "I've got a big cloud of ideas, but it hasn't all snapped into focus yet," Johnson added when asked how far along he is with the new script. "It's exciting, though, and it's very, very different from [Glass Onion]. That's what I'm excited about."

While the filmmaker couldn't offer up any specifics on plot, he did share an insight into his creative process for these movies: "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."

Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery finds Blanc traveling to the private island of eccentric tech billionaire, Miles Bron (Edward Norton), whose murder-mystery party suddenly turns into an actual murder investigation.

"For this, I did want to make sure that the audience knew that if we keep making these things, every single one of them is going to be like a new Agatha Christie book," Johnson said recently, while also reaffirming his general distaste for the "A Knives Out Mystery" subtitle. "It's going to be an entirely differently ball of wax. The third movie will be completely different from the second movie."

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is now streaming on Netflix.

Looking for more detective work in the meantime? Johnson's murder-of-the-week series — Poker Face — arrives on Peacock Thursday, Jan. 26. The new show stars Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a woman who knows when people are lying.