Rian Johnson’s a busy man, with his next Knives Out movie imminent, a wild Poker Face plan, and his return to sci-fi on the cards after that (although not a particular galaxy far, far away yet). And yet, the director has spent much of the last week defending himself from a wave of impromptu disappointment when he made it clear that the oddly specific fandom request of having Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc team up with a cast of murder-solving muppets was not going to be on the cards.
The felted furor emerged earlier this week when Johnson jokingly called himself a hypocrite on social media for being excited about a fan-made poster casting Miss Piggy in the hit Broadway play Oh Mary! after “giving a hard no to Muppet Knives Out.”
Lots of shocked and disappointed internet comments later, Johnson took to THR’s Awards Chatter podcast to back up his surprisingly controversial statement. “On the internet, the notion of a Knives Out Muppet movie comes up a lot… I wanted to get you guys together here so that I could explain why that’s a bad idea,” Johnson explained.
His theory? A Muppet Knives Out goes one of two ways, neither of which the director likes: put the Muppets in a Benoit Blanc movie, and they have to die (Johnson is clearly not a secret fan of The Happytime Murders). Put Benoit Blanc in a Muppet movie, and the character no longer functions.
“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,” Johnson explained. “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.”
But while his firm Muppet-based beliefs mean that Knives Out: A Very Muppet Murder Mystery is off the table, that doesn’t mean Johnson would say no to doing his own Muppet movie altogether—especially if it meant reconnecting with a Last Jedi colleague.
“I would just love to do a regular awesome Muppet movie… I’ll do the Muppet caper, or my Muppet musical. Get together with Frank Oz and cook something,” Johnson concluded. “That would be amazing.”
He might be in luck, considering that it seems like Disney is attempting to put effort into making the Muppets happen again. Beyond next year’s one-off anniversary revival of The Muppet Show, we recently learned that Oh Mary!‘s Cole Escola was teaming up with Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence on a Miss Piggy movie. Is there room for the next Great Muppet Caper, a Rian Johnson Whodunnit, alongside it?
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