Despite some striking similarities, filmmaker Rian Johnson wants to make it clear that the “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” tech billionaire character Miles Bron, played by Edward Norton, is not inspired by Elon Musk in any way.
The new film sees famed Southern detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) as travelling to Bron’s Greek island estate to play a murder mystery game with a small group of the mogul’s wealthy and influential friends.
Numerous viewers of the recent sequel have drawn comparisons between Norton’s character, who owns the estate where the film unfolds, and the Tesla magnate whose purchase and running of Twitter has dominated headlines over the past few months.
Johnson tells Wired that he wrote Glass Onion in 2020, long before Musk got involved in Twitter, and the character was intended to represent a familiar archetype. He calls the resonance very bizarre and jokes that “I hope there isn’t some secret marketing department at Netflix that’s funding this Twitter takeover”.
“The intent was to accurately reflect what it’s been like to have our heads in the middle of the cultural sphere for the past six years. It’s a pretty nightmarish kind of carnival, Fellini-esque inflated reality right now.
There’s a lot of general stuff about that sort of species of tech billionaire that went directly into [the Netflix film]. But obviously, it has almost a weird relevance in exactly the current moment. A friend of mine said, ‘Man, that feels like it was written this afternoon.’ And that’s just sort of a horrible, horrible accident, you know?”
“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” opened in cinemas last month for a single week before arriving on the Netflix service on December 23rd, where it had the sixth biggest launch of all time.
