That describes it perfectly. More movies like this, please!
I love watching and listening to things like this because it points out just how detailed directing is, placement of EVERYTHING in the scene is very common. Revealing just small things which come out later on is another, and even small uses of props that lend to coherent scenes and reference to points of the plot timeline are also commonly done. Not mentioned on this clip but colors, tones, materials, etc, also come into play.
Really good to hear that Rian notes all of this and that it was purposeful. So many of these details get lost when you just quickly watch a movie, and truly I should watch this again just to pick up more of it.
Thanks for linking this, Scott.
I enjoyed it for what it was. I thought it was neat that detective dude (easily the best part of the movie) called the girl Watson, and that’s basically what she was for the whole movie: the audience’s POV character and the naive reading of events, unaware of Sherlock’s deeper understanding throughout. The movie is clearly well thought out, and Johnson got to get some more subversion out of his system. I personally find this to be the only really decent movie he’s done that I’ve seen, with Brick being mostly a gimmick, and Looper being a below-average movie with great actors.
I watched this last night and really liked it, but I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get more of the family interacting with each other. With such a great cast, I really wanted more Arrested Development-style riffing and dunking on each other.
The movie still worked for me, it just worked so much that I wanted more!
I agree with this. I think focusing on the worker, while understandable, took away from some of the joys that come with a real whodunnit.
This just hit Prime so I finally watched it. What a gem! Best movie I’ve seen in forever. 10/10 would watch Kentucky Fried Daniel Craig in anything.
Boom.
FUCK YEEEEEEEES!
The movie was fun, but that is a lot of money to make a whodunit film. That’s action film territory.
That isn’t the production budget, it’s for streaming rights, and the article isn’t even clear on what exactly those $450M cover.
$225 million is assuredly not what each of them will cost to make. That’s just the purchase price. The first movie cost around $40-$50 million in production. I’d expect the sequels to have larger budgets, but probably around the $60-$80 million range.
Fuck yeah, assuming the deal comes with keeping the critical creative people in place.
That’s a lotta scratch.
That’s crazy another studio hadn’t already picked them up.
Whatever they would have been, at that price you can bet they’re getting Daniel Craig and Ana de Armas both back, and how the narrative does that is just scriptmonkey work.
I, for one, welcome our now perennial fake Southern accent overlord.
At that price it can’t be just the streaming rights, it has to be all distribution. I.e. there will only be enough of a theatrical release to meet the thresholds for awards eligibility.
The Variety article doesn’t even know, it has one number and a pile of speculation.
Anyway, of all the recent movies that might start a sequel chain, we could do a lot worse than Foghorn Leghorn Mysteries, but I would have hoped that after cashing in his Star Wars paycheck Rian Johnson would go back to making something as unconventional as The Brothers Bloom.
I still don’t understand how a sequel to this works, let alone two. The detective isn’t the interesting thing about it.
The article indeed doesn’t specify what rights are being sold. But we don’t need the article to specify it: just the number by itself is sufficient to know that it’s all distribution, not just streaming.
Knives Out made $300M in box office, so about $150M for the studio after the theaters took their cut. That was great for a movie with a $40M budget, but certainly not the kind of blockbuster that would justify $450M/2 for streaming rights.
$450M for two movies already makes these movies by far the most that Netflix has spent on any movie. (The Irishman was $160M, Six Underground was $150M).
So what was interesting about Knives Out?
Presumably a) the non-linear storytelling with multiple unreliable narrators building layer on layer of “what really happened”, b) switching the story from a whodunnit to “she did it, how will she avoid being caught?”, and then again to “no but really, who did it”, c) snappy dialogue, d) amazing cast. B is hard to replicate: once the audience expects a twist, you can’t surprise them with one. But the other three don’t seem unachievable.
(I just watched Wild Things 2 and Wild Things 3 last weekend. Don’t ask. They would both have been horrible movies anyway, but they were made doubly so by them trying to replicate the structure of Wild Things’ multiple nested plot twists. There was nothing surprising about any of it.)
So I figure that for the second movie, the gimmick will be that there is no twist even though the audience has been primed to expect one. The extremely sympathetic protagonist, whom all the evidence points at and who is shown to have committed the crime, really did do it. Worked for Columbo.
I’m more than happy to sign up for the further investigations of Benoit Blanc.
Primarily b), but also Ana de Armas’s performance, and then the ensemble cast.
I guess, to be more precise, I should say I don’t see how it (creatively) benefits a follow-up to be explicitly a sequel rather than just another film from (some of) the same people. I wouldn’t mind seeing another Rian Johnson helmed whodunnit, I just don’t need it to have any connection to the existing one. In particular Benoit Blanc, who was fun as a gimmick but I have no particular desire to see again.