When Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery was released on November 26, 2025, it arrived carrying the weight of massive expectations—and the crushing burden of a $210 million budget that would ultimately define its theatrical legacy in ways that had nothing to do with its actual quality. That disconnect between ambition and outcome tells us something important about modern cinema, but it’s also precisely the wrong place to start understanding what Rian Johnson actually accomplished with this film.
The real story here is that Johnson doubled down on what made the Knives Out franchise work in the first place: a director utterly comfortable with genre conventions who treats them not as constraints but as launching pads. The puzzle-box mystery formula has been around for decades, but Johnson approaches it with genuine affection—the kind that allows him to deconstruct and reinvent simultaneously. Wake Up Dead Man takes that formula and plants it somewhere genuinely unexpected: a small-town church with a dark history, where detective Benoit Blanc must navigate both the impossible crime and the spiritual ambiguities of faith itself.
What makes this film cinematically significant:
- The pairing of Daniel Craig’s world-weary detective with Josh O’Connor’s earnest young priest creates an unexpectedly potent dynamic—cerebral mystery-solving meets genuine moral inquiry
- Glenn Close’s presence anchors the ecclesiastical setting with the kind of gravitas that transforms what could be mere set dressing into thematic weight
- The 2 hour 25 minute runtime never feels indulgent; Johnson uses every minute to build atmosphere alongside plot
- The film premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2025 before its theatrical release, signaling serious festival credentials despite its streaming distribution model
Daniel Craig has become synonymous with Blanc across these films, and there’s genuine chemistry in watching an actor so associated with steely coolness instead embrace verbose Southern charm and genuine curiosity. O’Connor brings something fresher—the earnestness never tips into naïveté, which is crucial when your character occupies moral space within a fundamentally secular mystery. Glenn Close, meanwhile, doesn’t just occupy a role; she occupies the frame, lending the church itself a kind of lived-in credibility.
> The mystery works because Johnson understands that the best whodunits aren’t about the twist—they’re about the journey toward understanding why someone would commit a crime in the first place.
Now, about that box office performance: the $4 million theatrical gross against a $210 million budget represents one of cinema’s most spectacular financial failures. But here’s what’s crucial—and what casual observers often miss—that budget likely reflects the total production cost across multiple projects, the Netflix licensing deal, and global marketing spend across platforms. The theatrical numbers tell us something different than what a traditional studio film would communicate. They tell us that theatrical mystery-comedies face real headwinds in 2025, but they tell us absolutely nothing about whether the film succeeded as art or whether audiences engaging with it on streaming found value.
And they did. The 7.2/10 rating across 1,850 votes suggests a film that landed with core audiences who appreciated what Johnson was attempting. That’s not a consensus-destroying score, nor is it a masterpiece designation—it’s the rating of a film that divided some viewers but satisfied those predisposed to its sensibility. For a third film in a franchise, that’s honest work.
The creative vision that emerges:
- Johnson commits fully to the sacred-and-profane collision—this isn’t a film that treats the church setting as mere aesthetic window dressing
- The mystery itself operates on multiple levels simultaneously: the procedural puzzle, the character study, and the exploration of faith and doubt
- The ensemble cast elevates material that, in lesser hands, might feel overstuffed or tonally confused
- The runtime serves the pacing; this is patient mystery-making that trusts audience intelligence
What Wake Up Dead Man represents, ultimately, is a director secure enough in his vision to pursue increasingly idiosyncratic projects within the framework of a successful franchise. This is the opposite of creative stagnation. Johnson could have simply replicated the Glass Onion formula—and there would have been nothing wrong with that—but instead he shifted the setting, the spiritual inquiry, and the core thematic preoccupations. The film premiered internationally and went directly to Netflix, which says something about where prestige filmmaking actually lives in 2025, but it doesn’t diminish what Johnson achieved within those constraints.
The legacy of this film won’t be measured in theatrical box office figures. It will be measured in whether viewers discovering it on streaming find themselves thinking differently about mystery narratives, about faith and skepticism, about the relationship between Blanc’s rational investigation and O’Connor’s character’s spiritual framework. Those conversations are already happening, quietly, among people who’ve watched it at home and felt genuinely moved by its ambitions.
In a landscape increasingly dominated by IP recycling and safe commercial choices, Wake Up Dead Man remains significant precisely because it’s weird, because it’s expensive, and because it trusted audiences to sit with a 145-minute mystery that prioritizes character and atmosphere alongside plot mechanics. That’s worth remembering.
