Blades off star Jamie Lee Curtis explains why she was surprised by the film’s success. The Halloween actor starred in Blades off as Linda Drysdale, the eldest daughter of 85-year-old best-selling crime novel Harlan Thrombey, who emerges as one of several suspects when Harlan is found dead and Benoit Blanc begins to investigate. Ever since Glass Onion: A Knife Mystery When Blanc moves to Greece to solve an all-new mystery, Linda and her fellow members of the Thrombey family will not return in the upcoming sequel.
Daniel Craig led the star-studded Blades off cast as the private detective alongside Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Lakeith Stanfield, Katherine Langford, Jaeden Martell and Christopher Plummer. Written and directed by Star Wars: The Last Jedic‘s Ryan Johnson, Blades off received critical acclaim from critics for its subversive take on murder mystery tropes and also earned Johnson an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The whodunit was also a huge box office success, grossing $311 million on a $40 million budget. As a result of all the unexpected success, Netflix paid $469 million for the rights to two sequels, the first of which will be released later this year.
During a recent interview with Weekly entertainment Reflecting on her most famous roles over the years, Curtis reflected on the success of Blades off. Because the actress was “quite isolatedDuring production and she didn’t have much screen time, she had no idea how it would turn out and was pleasantly surprised when it became such a hit. Read what Curtis shared below:
I was actually quite isolated. I lived alone in this weird hotel, and I’m not a big part of the movie. I was alone a lot, and it was a very difficult time. It turned out to be this fantastic movie. I never knew the movie we were making was the movie we were making. It wasn’t clear to me, because Ryan was so specific in his methodology, and it’s not like we’re all looking at monitors and seeing all the work. We had no idea. We would just do our little thing and then go home. It was just such a lovely surprise.
Can Knives Out 2 surpass the success of the original?
During production, it’s understandable that Curtis wasn’t sure how Blades off would turn out and was therefore surprised by its success. In retrospect, however, the film’s success is hardly a mystery, but rather a consistent career trend for the writer/director. Johnson made his directorial debut with Stone in 2005, which was met with similar positive reviews and box office success for a low-budget mystery film. Johnson switched to higher profile movies with looper and The Last Jediand Blades off marked a return to his neo-noir roots, although the results were similar to his earlier projects.
Johnson has an almost flawless track record, which is why expectations are sky high for his follow-up. Knives from 2 early reactions have already indicated that the sequel may be better than the original. This will certainly raise expectations exponentially, so it should be interesting to see how the public reacts to the Blades off sequel when it premieres on December 23. Although this time around, the success of the whodunit will not be measured by box office totals, but by Netflix streaming numbers.
Source: EW
Key release dates
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Glass Onion: A Knife Mystery
