Wake Up Dead Man proves a Knives Out Muppets movie could work — here’s why

If Netflix wants to make a billion dollars, all it needs to is convince writer-director Rian Johnson to make a Knives Out movie starring the Muppets, alongside Daniel Craig as flamboyant detective Benoit Blanc. There’s just one problem: Johnson doesn’t seem particularly interested.

“It’s not a bad idea,” he recently told The Hollywood Reporter when asked about the internet’s favorite Knives Out fan-casting. “But 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.”

Here’s the thing, though: Johnson is wrong about the Muppets. And having watched his latest Knives Out/Benoit Blanc installment, Wake Up Dead Man, I think he might also be wrong about his own movies. (And before you even mention it, yes I’ve seen the Sesame Street Knives Out sketch. But Sesame Street and the Muppets are two entirely different things with very different tones, so I’ll be ignoring that in this article.)

If you consider the entire history of the 70-year Muppets franchise, not only does it become apparent that the Muppets can do pretty much anything, it’s also clear that a deadly whodunnit mystery has been in their DNA from the very beginning. The Muppets got their start in late-night TV segments and commercials. In both cases, creator Jim Henson often relied on comedic violence to tell quick, punchy stories.

“In the early days of the Muppets, we had two endings,” Henson once told biographer Stephanie St. Pierre. “Either one creature ate the other, or both of them blew up.”

Case in point, the Muppets’ first appearance on late-night TV was a segment on the Jack Parr show in 1963 where an early version of Kermit wearing a long, blonde wig is eaten alive by a skull-shaped puppet. Henson’s first breakout advertisement featuring the Muppets was a coffee commercial where two lumpy creatures attack each other with cannons and other weapons. Years later, when Henson decided the Muppets deserved their own TV show, his first attempt was a 25-minute special titled The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence.

The point is, the Muppets were plenty violent and edgy from the very beginning. The franchise’s tone has changed in the decades since — especially after Disney bought the characters in 2004 — but the potential is still there. After all, if self-proclaimed horndog Sabrina Carpenter can star in a new Muppet Show special, then why can’t Kermit and Fozzie Bear help Benoit Blanc solve a grisly murder?

Image: Henson Company/The Everett Collection

So what about Knives Out? Is the whodunnit series really elastic enough to include the Muppets without snapping? Based solely on the first two entries in the series, I would have argued no. 2019’s Knives Out and 2022’s Glass Onion are both tightly tuned murder mysteries dipped in quippy socio-political commentary. These are films where famous actors speak dialogue that reads like Twitter memes, while a mercurial detective slowly unties a knotty murder.

Both movies are also defined by complex, multilayered narratives that twist and fold up into themselves. Glass Onion takes half its runtime to reveal that one of the main characters — spoiler alert — actually already died, and has been secretly replaced by her identical twin, cleverly changing the meaning of everything we’ve already seen on-screen. It’s the kind of meticulous storytelling that admittedly wouldn’t work quite as well with the Muppets running around on-screen, shouting their fuzzy little heads off. (Even if the physical comedy in these films sometimes verges into Muppets territory.)

Image: Netflix

So it’s perhaps good news for Muppets fans that Wake Up Dead Man ditches most of what previously seemed to define a Knives Out movie. Sure, there’s still a murder, and Benoit Blanc still shows up to solve it, but that’s about where the comparisons end. Johnson’s focus here is on resculpting his franchise into gothic horror and an exploration of religious faith.

As a result, he ditches much of the political commentary and experimental storytelling in favor of striking visuals and some genuinely spooky jump-scares. (When I saw Wake Up Dead Man in theaters, the Knives Out fan sitting to my left was clearly unprepared for a horror movie, and barely made it through the experience.) And while there are still a few clever twists and turns, none of it really measure up to what we’ve seen from Blanc’s previous outings when it comes to pure whodunnit creativity.

Photo: John Wilson/Netflix

So if Knives Out can become a horror movie and still be Knives Out, then why not a Muppets movie? Nothing about Johnson’s franchise or the Muppets themselves is genuinely standing in the way, aside from the fact that Netflix and Disney might not be in the mood to share their IP. But assuming the lawyers can work it out, I don’t see why the next entry in the whodunnit series can’t be one where Benoit Blanc shares the screen with Miss Piggy. Maybe then, he’ll finally meet his match.