Rian Johnson is determined to be wrong about a Muppets/Knives Out crossover
Johnson argues that Benoit Blanc and Kermit The Frog couldn't share a reality without losing what makes either one special.
Rian Johnson, Photo: StillMoving.Net for Netflix
Look: We get as sick of certain meme-y thoughtworms as anybody who has to spend a lot of their daily lives with their brains rubbed up against the internet. Social media and conventional wisdom are great at throwing up film and movie ideas that sound great on paper, which then get run swiftly into the ground as everybody with a working repost finger parrots them. Many an “Oh, haha, yeah, that’d be cool” flash-in-the-pan concept has given way to outright despair when faced with the practicalities of making some internet-hatched casting idea or show concept come to fruition. And yet, despite this strong and basic bias, we still have to come out hard against Knives Out director Rian Johnson, and side with the internet in this one, very specific case: We still think a Muppets/Knives Out crossover could make for a damn fine movie.
Johnson waded into the controversy around this topic earlier this week, during an appearance on THR‘s Awards Chatter podcast. When asked about an earlier social media post he’d made dismissing the popular idea—which has been circulating for years at this point, and would hypothetically drop Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc into the world of Muppet-based chaos—Johnson lays out his logic for rejecting the concept thusly: “I love and respect Muppet movies too much. The reality is, if you put Muppets in a Benoit Blanc movie, it would feel totally wrong because they would be getting murdered. The alternative is to just stick Benoit Blanc into a Muppet movie, which admittedly would be very fun, but would kind of break the reality of what Blanc is.”
