Sweet relief, the last CinemaCon panel is over. This is it! No more of these posts! My big takeaway from CinemaCon – again, a convention for theater owners – is, according to the speeches, every movie studio is about to have a banner year and streaming services aren’t a threat at all. Alright then!
Enough of that, let’s get into the Lionsgate presentation of Knives Out, Rian Johnson’s whodunnit film featuring an all-star cast – Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Lakeith Stanfield, Ana de Armas, and on and on – that he’s sandwiching in-between Star Wars: The Last Jedi and his upcoming, still unknown Star Wars films.
Look, I’m tired and cranky. I want to go home. The evidence of this is in that first paragraph I wrote. But, the premiere of the Knives Out footage got me going. It made me happy. I didn’t think that was possible right now. This movie looks like a whole heck of a lot of fun.
Introducing the film, Johnson said it was influenced by his love of Agatha Christie novels. So he wanted to make a movie like that, with a lot of characters and a plot twist, and set it in the United States. The footage starts with a death of a family patriarch (Christopher Plummer) at his own 85th birthday party. Everyone in attendance is a suspect. Daniel Craig plays a detective who is going to solve the crime and informs the suspects they are not allowed to leave the house until his investigation is over.
Honestly, it feels like a cool, stylized, gritty Clue. Though, still with a lot of comedy. My favorite part of the trailer is when the murder is being described and we hear that one high chilling piano note we see in pretty much every movie trailer today that’s trying to set that mood. Only here, the camera then pans back to Craig, who is sitting at the piano playing that note. This is one of those movies where everyone in the cast is just going for it. Daniel Craig is playing a wacky character!
The footage was set to Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die,” which who knows if that will still be used when this is all released, but it’s effective. But, anyway, yes, I’m in for a cool Clue. That should be the new name of the movie, Cool Clue.
And that’s it. My CinemaCon is over. Now, thankfully, I will never have to watch a movie trailer ever again.
You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.
