Frame by frame
Can cinemas and Netflix coexist? Rian Johnson makes his case
Agood movie mystery often includes the disappearance of something valuable. But what happens when the movie itself goes missing?
Consider the curious case of Glass Onion, the director Rian Johnson’s eagerly awaited follow-up to Knives Out. This rollicking whodunit — which, like its predecessor, stars Daniel Craig as the drawling sleuth Benoit Blanc — appeared in about 600 theatres the day before Thanksgiving, packed in crowds for one week and then vanished. Glass Onion was released on Netflix last week.
For Netflix, which paid a reported US$465 million (16.1 billion baht) in March 2021 to snag the rights to Glass Onion and a third Benoit Blanc mystery, this represents an intriguing new gambit. Though the Netflix co-chief executive Reed Hastings admitted that Glass Onion could have made more money with a longer theatrical release, its “sneak preview” was meant mainly to stoke interest in the eventual streaming debut, he said.
“We are not trying to build a theatrical business,” he told the New York Times DealBook Summit. “We are trying to break through the noise.”
Johnson believes those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. I spoke to the filmmaker a few days after Glass Onion left cinemas. He had spent that week popping into New York and Los Angeles showings of the movie and told me: “After the last couple of years, to see full theatres with people having a blast, it was really emotional.” And though he appreciates that Netflix was able to secure its widest theatrical release ever for Glass Onion, even booking top theatres that normally shun the company’s titles, Johnson hopes future crowd-pleasers from the streamer have an even better chance of reaching those crowds.
Now that you’re on the other end of the theatrical experiment, how do you feel about it?
I love it, I want more. I’m very grateful to Netflix and the cinema chains — this was a big deal for them and they really stepped up in terms of reaching across the aisle. My hope is that we do great when it comes on the service, so that we really demonstrate that these two things can complement each other.
Some Netflix filmmakers have secured theatrical runs as long as five weeks. Why did you feel only one week was the right length for
Glass Onion?
Because it’s what we could get, honestly. We would have taken more if we could, but the difference with this is a couple of things. First, it’s Netflix actually putting some muscle behind the promotion of the theatrical run, which they hadn’t really done before. It’s also the fact that we were in the big chains, AMC and Regal and Cinemark, and we were in the theatres that had the highest traffic. So even though at first glance it could look like this is similar to what they’ve done before, it felt very, very different, and I was really thankful for those differences.
Do you think Netflix left money on the table? Or is it not in the company’s best interest to have this play longer in theatres?
I don’t know, man, that’s out of my purview. It’s probably good for Netflix’s stockholders that I don’t run Netflix. The reality is, we’re partners with them and they’ve been terrific to us, but very obviously, I wish we could have been in theatres longer. Hopefully, next time, we will be.
Lionsgate distributed the first movie, but there was no sequel deal, which meant that major companies like Apple, Netflix and Amazon all made offers to secure the future of the franchise. Have you ever gone through a bidding war like that before?
It’s a first for me.
So, how did it feel to be the belle of the ball?
Very cool, but also nerve-wracking, because it’s not just about taking the best deal. It’s about trying to innovate in a time of great tumultuous change.
What were the factors that you weighed?
Ultimately, it was a moment where the model that we released Knives Out under had ceased to exist, and a moment where the studios were basically flipping their big movies to streamers anyway. Having a direct partner with the biggest streamer made a lot of sense.
When you say that the model for releasing Knives Out had ceased to exist, do you mean it didn’t exist in March 2021, or do you think that model doesn’t exist going forward, period?
I was talking about ’21, when we struck the deal. Right now, I don’t know. I’m probably a little more optimistic about theatrical, but at the same time, you look at the numbers and it’s not what it was pre-pandemic. Even when I’m thinking about the next movie, which I’m about to start writing, who the hell knows what the landscape is going to look like when it’s actually time to release it? All I know is it’ll probably be as different from today as today was from ’21.
I’ve seen online complaints that if you cared about the future of theatrical distribution, you wouldn’t have sold to a streamer.
Look, I cared about it. I fought my ass off to get it in the theatres it was in. I sympathise, though. I believe in theatrical releases, and I hope everyone knows I’m working as hard as I can to push, push, push it. I also believe that a successful theatrical run will only make its presence more valuable when it hits the streamer. It absolutely makes noise, it makes a cultural moment, it spreads word of mouth. That’s what we’re setting out to prove here.
Take me into your writing process. How solvable do you want a mystery to be when you’re constructing it?
You want an audience to be having so much fun that they forget they’re supposed to be solving anything.
The ideal thing is that the mystery element of it feels satisfying when it’s revealed at the end, because it all ties together, but it’s not the thing that’s predominantly on your mind while you’re watching the movie. You should be having too much fun to be doing that math in your head.
Since the first movie was a hit, did you feel you had the wind at your back while making Glass Onion?
No, and the day we feel like the wind is at our back is probably the day to stop making them. If anything, it felt more scary because with the first one, no one was paying attention to us. And because this is a whole different movie, a whole different cast, and even the tone of it is very different than the first film, it felt like a whole new ball of wax, which is the only way I ever want it to be with these films. With the third one, I’m already thinking about how it can be scary for me in that same way. How can it be something that feels as different from the second one as the second one did from the first?
As you’re brainstorming the third movie, would you say there’s a thematic throughline to this franchise?
Well, I honestly don’t want there to be. If there’s any kind of thing that seems indispensable, it’s engagement with the moment, in terms of culture. And structurally, the detective is never the protagonist, so that means these movies are always going to need somebody different at the heart of the story that the audience cares about.
Does it surprise you how eager you’ve been to jump right into the third movie, instead of shooting something else first?
It honestly did. Up until Toronto (in September, when festival audiences responded raucously to the film), I had it in my head that it would be healthy to do something totally different next, and I have a couple ideas I’m still excited about. But I found myself straying back to the notion of what the third mystery movie could be. Finally, I was just like, ‘You know what? The siren song is calling me back.’ What I’m most interested in is figuring out how the third movie could define the wingspan of what this series can be going forward. That’s very exciting to me.
I fought my ass off to get it in the theatres
So 20 years from now, we’re not going to get a limited series about young Benoit Blanc? One of those prequels where at the end of the first season, he finally gets his Southern accent?
Or he finds a neckerchief and looks in the mirror? [Laughs.] If they do that, go with God. © 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES