Netflix’s Biggest Movie Is Heading Back To Theaters?
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery may be heading back to the big screen in the near future. Director Rian Johnson is pushing for the film to get a wider theatrical release in the aftermath of Netflix’s odd decision to only show the film in theaters for a single week. During an interview with Insider, the Knives Out director stated “Any theaters we can get it into at any point I’m pushing for. I want more people to have the opportunity to be able to watch it.”
The film, which brought in over $15 million during its brief Thanksgiving week theater run, follows another murder mystery after the events of the first Knives Out film from 2019. Daniel Craig’s detective Benoit Blanc searches for a murderer during a remote vacation to Greece alongside a host of big name actors and a series of celebrity guests playing themselves such as tennis legend Serena Williams and NBA hall of famer Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
Though the film is a Netflix original, set to drop on the streaming giant on December 23rd, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings agrees that pushing the film’s theatrical release to be even bigger may have been a mistake, remarking that the studio “Left money on the table.”
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery received the largest theater distribution in Netflix’s history thus far, spanning around 600 screens across AMC, Regal, ad Cinemark, the three largest theater chains, but Rian Johnson is aiming even higher for the future. The Last Jedi filmmaker described his plan during a zoom call with Insider, stating he plans to push Knives Out 2 as hard as possible to see how far he can take the release of his upcoming third installment of the series, which Netflix has also optioned.
As it stands, very few Netflix originals get a theatrical release to begin with, save for big-name titles such as the Tom Holland-led Devil All The Time or the Euphoria creator Sam Levinson’s film Malcolm and Marie, which both saw similarly limited theater installations.
The success of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery during its limited theater release may lead to the streaming studio taking bigger risks in the future, displaying that subscribers are willing to travel to the theater for quality films despite them coming to the home screen shortly thereafter.
Rian Johnson’s goal, in his own words, is to ensure that films such as Knives Out 2 can coexist on both streaming and theatrical platforms, and bring home money both ways. Perhaps in the next few years, we’ll see a full theatrical release countrywide for Knives Out 3.
For now, only time will tell, though Johnson says he’d like to get Knives Out 2 back into theaters at some point, he stresses that it likely won’t happen until after the film becomes available to stream on December 23rd. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that the popcorn hit will come to your city any day now, and hope for an early Christmas gift.
