Digging into ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ with Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman

November 28, 2025·30 min·2 clips

Rian Johnson called his producer in panic, saying the Wake Up Dead Man script 'just might not work'.

Netflix changes the scale. Johnson says the jump from the first theatrical hit to the later Netflix release felt like the difference between throwing a bullet and shooting it. The megaphone is real, but Masters pushes on what that actually means. Can streamers create phenomena, or do they mostly amplify what theaters already made visible? Johnson does not oversell it. He says the Blanc films benefited from awareness Knives Out had already earned in theaters, which gives the Netflix success a different shape. Bergman stays grounded in the producing work. For him, control starts with spending their own money before financiers enter the room. They take the early risk, develop the movie properly, and bring in a package with enough detail that studios have less room to meddle. Johnson is also frank about the original doubt around Knives Out. Friends wondered if a musty whodunit was really the best use of his Star Wars credit. That gamble worked. Masters gets into casting too, and the team describes the Knives Out process as unusually late and sequential. They are careful about what carried over to Glass Onion and the new film, and what only belonged to that first movie. Wake Up Deadman is getting a brief limited theatrical run before it lands on Netflix on December 12th.

As heard by us

A smart industry-side conversation about Benoit Blanc's Netflix-era rise, with the theatrical tradeoff left plainly on the table.

The Business looks at Wake Up Dead Man through the machinery behind Benoit Blanc rather than the mystery itself. Kim Masters draws Rian Johnson and Bergman into the less glamorous parts of the Knives Out story: why the first film felt like a gamble after Star Wars, how Johnson…

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Why you'd press play

You want the backroom story of how Knives Out keeps getting made.

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