Rian Johnson divided Star Wars fans, then made the whodunit a hit again

Rian Johnson

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 17, 1973 Silver Spring, Maryland, United States
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	Knives Out, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Looper
Awards	Special Jury Prize · Directors Guild of America

Nobody in a Rian Johnson film tells the truth for long. High-school kids in a California suburb trade lines like gangsters out of Dashiell Hammett, and a detective with an outrageous Southern drawl turns out to be the sharpest person in every mansion he enters. Johnson builds elaborate machines out of lies and lets the audience watch him take them apart. The exception is the film that turned him into a lightning rod: the Star Wars chapter that asked Luke Skywalker to admit he had failed.

What came after says more about him than the backlash did. Given the keys to a trilogy of his own inside the galaxy far, far away, Johnson went off and made a modest whodunit with Daniel Craig as the detective Benoit Blanc, and turned it into that rare thing, an original series that streaming made bigger rather than smaller. Seen from here, the blockbuster looks less like the peak of his career than an interruption of it.

Johnson spent his early childhood in Denver before his family moved to San Clemente, California, when he was in sixth grade; he had been born in Silver Spring, Maryland, on December 17, 1973. San Clemente High School, where he graduated in 1992, would later serve as the main location of his first feature. Seeing Woody Allen’s Annie Hall convinced him to become a director, and he graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 1996.

Brick was made for under half a million dollars, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a teenage loner investigating his ex-girlfriend’s death in the clipped, slang-thick dialogue of a hardboiled novel. It won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and grossed nearly four million dollars. Gordon-Levitt has appeared in every feature Johnson has made since.

The Brothers Bloom, a globe-trotting con-artist caper with Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz, met a cooler reception in 2009. Television gave him a different education. He directed three episodes of Breaking Bad: “Fly”, in which Walter White spends an entire hour hunting an insect loose in the lab; “Fifty-One”, which won him the Directors Guild of America award for drama directing; and “Ozymandias”, regularly listed among the finest hours of American television.

Looper, in 2012, brought the pieces together. Gordon-Levitt played a hired killer who disposes of victims sent back from the future, until the target turns out to be his own older self, played by Bruce Willis. The film opened the Toronto International Film Festival and became a surprise commercial hit. Two years later, Lucasfilm confirmed that Johnson would write and direct the eighth episode of the Skywalker saga.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi grossed more than $1.3 billion worldwide and was the highest-grossing film of 2017. It also split the fan base in a way no earlier episode had. Johnson’s Luke Skywalker was a hermit who had once considered killing his own nephew and then walked away from the fight, and Rey was told that her parents were nobodies. A loud part of the audience treated the film as a betrayal, and Rotten Tomatoes later acknowledged that its user score had been seriously targeted by a review-bombing campaign. Kelly Marie Tran, the first woman of color in a leading Star Wars role, was harassed off social media, and Johnson defended her publicly.

The story usually told about what happened next is that the backlash scared him off. Lucasfilm announced in November 2017 that Johnson would create a new trilogy apart from the Skywalker family; it never got past the conceptual stage. When Kathleen Kennedy, leaving the presidency of Lucasfilm in January 2026, said she believed he had been “spooked” by online negativity, Johnson answered on X in four words: “Lol zero spooked, sorry.” Kennedy offered a more prosaic reason in the same interview: the Knives Out films had swallowed his time. What is plain is that the film most often filed as his misstep is also the one that bought him the freedom to make whatever he wanted next, and he has kept defending it.

What he wanted was Agatha Christie. Knives Out, released in 2019, sent Craig’s Benoit Blanc into the gothic house of a dead crime novelist played by Christopher Plummer, with Ana de Armas as the nurse who cannot lie without throwing up. It grossed more than $300 million and earned Johnson his first Academy Award nomination, for original screenplay. Netflix paid a reported $450 million for two sequels. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery followed in 2022 with a one-week theatrical run before streaming and brought him a second nomination, for adapted screenplay. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery completed the deal in 2025 by moving Blanc into a small-town Catholic parish, with Josh O’Connor as a young priest and Glenn Close among the faithful.

Television pulled him back as well. Poker Face, which he created for Peacock with Natasha Lyonne as a casino worker who can tell when anyone is lying, revived the case-of-the-week format of Columbo. Peacock cancelled it in November 2025 after two seasons; Johnson has been shopping it elsewhere with Peter Dinklage taking over the lead. Through T-Street, the company he runs with his longtime producer Ram Bergman, he also executive produced American Fiction, which won the Oscar for adapted screenplay.

Wake Up Dead Man premiered at the Toronto festival in September 2025 and reached Netflix on December 12, topping its English-language film chart for two weeks with smaller numbers than Glass Onion. Unlike its two predecessors, it drew no Oscar nomination. This month The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, a crime film he produced for Noah Segan, an actor in Johnson’s casts since Brick, opened in New York and Los Angeles through Sony Pictures Classics after premiering at Sundance in January, with John Turturro and Steve Buscemi in the cast.

Johnson has been married since 2018 to Karina Longworth, the film historian behind the podcast You Must Remember This. His cousin Nathan Johnson has scored every one of his features except The Last Jedi, which went to John Williams, and the two play together as a folk duo, The Preserves, with Rian on banjo.

His next film as director is an original he is writing himself and has described as a 1970s-style paranoid thriller with a light science-fiction element. Blanc has not been retired either: in January Johnson said he already had some basic, conceptual ideas for a fourth mystery. Before either arrives, he is producing 2034, a thriller directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which closes a circle that opened with a teenage detective in a San Clemente high school.

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Tags: American cinema, Rian Johnson, Daniel Craig, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Knives Out, Looper

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