Rian Johnson, the director of “Glass Onion,” laments a film with the title “Knives Out”

Rian Johnson talks about how Glass Onion came to be: A Knives Out Mystery, and he said he was disappointed that the movie had the name Knives Out.

Johnson put a lot of effort into creating a follow-up to his 2019 smash Knives Out that would be its own story with only detective Benoit Blanc returning from the first film.

“I’ve tried hard to make them self-contained. Honestly, I’m pissed off that we have A Knives Out Mystery in the title,” Johnson told The Atlantic in an interview. “I want it to just be called Glass Onion.”

Johnson continued, “I get it, and I want everyone who liked the first movie to know this is next in the series, but also, the whole appeal to me is it’s a new novel off the shelf every time. But there’s a gravity of a thousand suns toward serialized storytelling.”

The writer and director of the 2017 film Star Wars: The Last Jedi also attempted to conclude the story despite being the second film in a trilogy, .

“In terms of the Star Wars movie I did, I tried to give it a hell of an ending. I love endings so much that even doing the middle chapter of the trilogy, I tried to give it an ending,” he explained. “A good ending that recontextualizes everything that came before it and makes it a beautiful object unto itself—that’s what makes a movie a movie. It feels like there’s less and less of that. This whole poisonous idea of creating [intellectual property] has completely seeped into the bedrock of storytelling. Everyone is just thinking, How do we keep milking it? I love an ending where you burn the Viking boat into the sea.”