Just Call It 'Knives Out 2'

Say you’re Rian Johnson, director of the massively popular film Knives Out. People went absolutely gaga for your movie, you get to take credit for bringing Ana de Armas to the nation’s consciousness, and everyone everywhere is constantly buttering you up and clamoring for the sequel to what many people said was one of the best works of cinema of 2019. Seems like a pretty good life.

So why on earth would you call the much-anticipated Knives Out sequel Glass Onion?

What are we supposed to do with this title? What the heck is a glass onion? Like the Beatles song? Just call it Knives Out 2, no need to get fancy about it.

I’ll concede that sometimes a “2” is unnecessary, like when the sequel to the Jesse Eisenberg magician movie Now You See Me was titled Now You See Me 2 instead of something like Now You Don’t. That was a situation that demanded a fun, playful title, a sleight of hand via phrasing.

But Knives Out? Not so much. Am I to believe that the knives will be in when Kate Hudson, Ed Norton, Ethan Hawke, and Janelle Monáe find themselves in a tense whodunit set in Greece? Is Daniel Craig’s Kentucky-fried detective Benoit Blanc going to keep his blade sheathed? Bring those knives out!

I’m sure much will be made on the press tour about how this isn’t a true sequel to Knives Out. That it’s just the next Benoit Blanc movie, one deserving of its own title — Johnson has already said as much in a different tweet. I am going to preemptively call bullshit. No one cares, call it Knives Out 2.