The European premiere of Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery will close the 66th BFI London Film Festival (LFF) on Sunday, October 16.
The selection means Netflix is behind both the opening and closing films of this year’s festival. The streamer has worldwide rights excluding UK and Ireland to festival opener Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical; Sony Pictures UK and Tristar Pictures are releasing theatrically in the UK and Ireland.
Glass Onion will play at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London, with simultaneous screenings at additional UK cinemas. Writer-director Rian Johnson and lead actor Daniel Craig will attend the screening, alongside Craig’s fellow cast members Edward Norton, Janelle Monae, Leslie Odom Jr., Kate Hudson and Madelyn Cline, plus producer Ram Bergman with more to be confirmed.
The film will arrive at London from a world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival in September.
Glass Onion sees Craig reprise the role of master sleuth Benoit Blanc, who travels to Greece to peel back the layers of a mystery involving a new cast of colourful suspects. It is produced by Johnson and Bergman for their company T-Street.
It is a sequel to Johnson’s 2019 murder mystery Knives Out, which grossed £13.3m in the UK and Ireland through Lionsgate as part of a $311.6m (£255.9m) worldwide gross.
Netflix bought the rights to two further Knives Out titles in March 2021, in a deal reported to be worth over $400m.
Johnson called the closing slot “an honour”, adding “a proper whodunnit really does belong in London, so it feels a bit like coming home!”
The first Knives Out film played at LFF in 2019, having also debuted at Toronto, and went on to an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.
LFF festival director Tricia Tuttle described the sequel as “entertaining and culturally literate in equal measure, making some hilarious, razor-sharp observations about the world we live in.”
The selection continues a strong Netflix link for LFF, which opened last year’s festival with Jeymes Samuel’s western The Harder They Fall and closed the 2019 festival with Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman – both Netflix titles.
The LFF programme launch for 2022 takes place on Thursday, September 1.
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