The franchise-ification of Knives Out is in full effect. After solving mysteries in a Southern drawl across 2019’s Knives Out and 2022’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Daniel Craig will officially return as Detective Benoit Blanc for Knives Out 3, Netflix announced on Friday. Titled Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the new film will once again be written, directed, and produced by Rian Johnson, alongside his producing partner, Ram Bergman.
“I love everything about whodunnits, but one of the things I love most is how malleable the genre is,” Johnson wrote on X in a thread announcing the film’s new title. “There’s a whole tonal spectrum from [John Dickson] Carr to [Agatha] Christie, and getting to explore that range is one of the most exciting things about making Benoit Blanc movies.”
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Ahead, everything we know about Knives Out 3, which Netflix is calling Benoit Blanc’s “most dangerous case yet.”
Does Knives Out 3 have a release date yet?
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery will stream on Netflix globally in 2025. After the commercial success of the first movie, Netflix shelled out reported $450 million in 2021 for rights to Knives Out 2 and Knives Out 3. The new film will likely secure an awards-qualifying theatrical run before heading to the streamer, as Johnson earned best screenplay Oscar nominations for both previous outings.
Who will be in Knives Out 3?
“It’s a weird thing with these movies because the detective is at the heart of it, but the detective is never the protagonist of the movie,” Johnson previously told Vanity Fair. No official cast members outside of Craig have been announced, but the filmmaker knows a thing or two about assembling a starry cast.
In the first film, Blanc investigates the death of a mystery writer who was suspected to be murdered in his own Massachusetts mansion. The late Christopher Plummer played said scribe alongside an impressive group including Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, and Lakeith Stanfield.
The sequel took place on a billionaire’s futuristic private island. Edward Norton brought to life the eccentric Miles Bron and was joined by Kate Hudson, Leslie Odom Jr., Kathryn Hahn, Dave Bautista, Madelyn Cline, and Janelle Monáe. That movie was also riddled with A-list cameos from Angela Lansbury, Stephen Sondheim, and Hugh Grant—who played the now canonically queer Benoit Blanc’s love interest.
What will Knives Out 3 be about?
Outside of the visible casket imagery in the film’s first tease, plot details are being kept under wraps. But after the outlandish antics of Glass Onion’s high-tech manor, Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson has at least one request, as outlined in his Glass Onion review: “I just hope that in his third outing, Detective Blanc finds himself in a humble old regular-sized mansion,” he writes. “That’s where he works best.”
This post will be updated.