The Rian Johnson Model for Saving Hollywood
Each of Rian Johnson’s films has upended genre norms and subverted audience expectations. Along the way, he’s quietly upended the norms of the film industry at-large.
Hollywood would love the world to think it always works the way Rian Johnson’s career has. He’s an example of the “Sundance Dream,” a film school graduate with no industry connections who launched his career with a win of the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival for his first, self-funded, film Brick. Brick is a classic film noir-style detective mystery with one crucial twist: it’s set in a high school. The unique setting unlocked a world of creative choices that lent its story a new level of relatability, refreshed a half-century old genre, and launched a career that would be built on the kind of subversive decisions that made Brick so memorable.
Two decades later, Johnson continues to subvert expectations in such a fashion as to address each of Hollywood’s most critical issues, while pragmatically operating within the reality of the system as it exists. Following Brick, he wrote and directed two more original films, each at greater levels of reach and success, while expanding his breadth of experience with directing gigs on shows like Breaking Bad. His growing profile led to his biggest break yet, writing and directing the second in a new trilogy of Star Wars movies. Most directors, given the chance to direct a Star Wars movie, would play it as safe as possible. Instead, Johnson made some of the boldest decisions in a Star Wars movie so far: killing off the trilogy’s new villain, shooting down fan-theories about new star Rey’s parental lineage, destroying the sacred tree which contained the Jedi order’s most ancient religious texts, and turning the hero of the entire franchise into a grumpy old hermit who is so jaded that he refuses to leave his self-induced exile to save the galaxy once more.
After production concluded on The Last Jedi, Star Wars’ studio Lucasfilm announced that they had such a positive experience working with Johnson on the movie that he would begin working on his own trilogy of independent Star Wars movies. Rather than take the one-way ticket to a galaxy far, far away, however, he chose to pursue a new idea. In November 2019, Johnson came back to theaters with an original mystery movie called Knives Out.
(Spoiler warning: Knives Out spoilers follow, with minor spoilers for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Sequel later on.)
Knives Out presents itself as a classic Agatha Christie-style whodunnit, complete with an ensemble cast, genius detective, and confined setting. Then, just prior to the film’s halfway point, it flips the whole detective genre on its head as the killer and her entire backstory are revealed. Suddenly, it’s no longer a detective story but a crime film with the killer, Marta, as our protagonist attempting to get away with an accidental homicide. We watch as Marta reckons with the consequences of her mistake, covers up her tracks, and attempts to outwit world-class detective Benoit Blanc. Just as the audience settles in, the movie pulls one more trick, returning to whodunnit form as the detective reveals his discovery: there was a bigger conspiracy at work the whole time, Marta was innocent, and in reality the culprit is the character the audience likely suspected from the start.
The movie was such a success that it was immediately announced that studio Lionsgate would be producing a sequel with Johnson returning to write and direct again. Later, Netflix bought the rights to two sequels from Lionsgate and Johnson’s company, T-Street. From a certain perspective it may appear Johnson sold out by taking his story and selling two sequels to Netflix, Hollywood’s primary disrupter, for a significant sum of money. But when it came time for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Sequel to be released late last year, he used his sway to convince Netflix to do something it had never done before. Glass Onion was the first Netflix original film to get a wide theatrical release — albeit on a more limited number of screens and for a limited amount of time.
In each of his most successful films, Johnson used his deep understanding of film history and his audience to make subversive creative decisions that challenged expectations and created something wholly new. Now, he has taken that success and used it to challenge the operating model of one of the most powerful players in the industry.
The new show Poker Face on Peacock is Johnson’s most recent success at doing something new by breathing new life into something old. Rather than following a modern television format of serialized storytelling in which each episode builds on the last to tell an extended story over multiple seasons, Poker Face exists as a largely episodic show, with each episode containing its own mystery that will be solved within the episode. There are some serialized elements that provide continuity between each chapter, but it’s a very successful attempt to bring a simpler kind of TV show to a modern audience.
Throughout his career, Johnson has acted as an antidote to some of Hollywood’s most significant flaws. Hollywood is obsessed with shallow fan-service, so when Rian Johnson got his hands on one of the most successful franchises in film history, he made decisions intentionally designed to challenge its most hardcore fans. Hollywood lacks originality in its stories, especially in films that are geared towards a mainstream audience, so Rian Johnson wrote and directed an original detective movie, an original action movie, and an original murder mystery that reached mainstream success with a combined $500 million in theaters worldwide. Hollywood is obsessed with franchises that never end, so when Rian Johnson got the opportunity to lead his own franchise he made sure each installment was a self-contained story with a clear and concrete ending. Hollywood is struggling to find a way to make money as streamers kill movie theaters, so Rian Johnson took his ultra-popular franchise to the streamer and convinced it to release it in theaters.
It’s his pragmatism that makes him worth paying attention to as a force for change in the industry. He’s working with a streaming company to release his Knives Out sequels. He’s working in the franchise world to tell his stories (it doesn’t get much more franchise than Star Wars). But he’s also doing all of that while confidently innovating and pushing the medium forward. He’s not out there attempting to return Hollywood to its glory days in one fell swoop. Instead, he’s working within the system as it stands to challenge the status quo piece by piece.
Johnson has proven that he is an astute commentator who is very much in tune with the culture. If it’s not intentional, there is no way that he does not at the very least see the irony in the fact that he partnered with Netflix, of all companies, to release his latest film. Netflix — the “visionary” tech company that upended Hollywood’s business model — whose money has now been used to make a movie largely satirizing tech companies and their “visionary” executives who make brash decisions with world re-shaping consequences that even they don’t fully understand.