Rian Johnson says Glass Onion's similarities to Elon Musk are a 'horrible accident'
Warning: Contains spoilers for Glass Onion.
Rian Johnson has said the striking similarities between Elon Musk and a character in his murder mystery movie Glass Onion are entirely coincidental.
The Knives Out director returned with a sequel to the popular film with Daniel Craig returning as Benoit Blanc, the gentleman detective with the Foghorn Leghorn accent.
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The first movie took place in the mansion of crime thriller writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) as Blanc tried to solve his apparent murder and work out whodunnit.
Things were shook up for the sequel as Craig's drawling detective gets invited to a private island where everyone has a motive to bump off tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton).
The movie has proved to be popular with critics and audiences, with most people streaming Glass Onion on Netflix after a limited cinematic release, but lots of viewers picked up on some startling similarities between Bron and Elon Musk.
Bron is a tech billionaire with an unimaginable level of wealth who rubs shoulders with the rich, famous and powerful while being hailed as a genius by the wider world, but actually makes quite a lot of dumb decisions.
One of the key plot points of the movie is Benoit Blanc realising that Bron is actually an idiot, and that unravelling the mystery requires him to stop thinking of the billionaire as some sort of genius who actually knows what he's doing.
Glass Onion released in cinemas in the midst of Musk's ongoing debacle surrounding him buying Twitter and seemingly having little idea what he's actually doing.
Seeing a tech billionaire everyone thought was smart but is actually really dumb led plenty of viewers to assume Bron was meant as a takedown of the Twitter boss.
However, Johnson has been downplaying the connection between Bron and Musk, telling Wired he was targeting tech billionaires in general rather than going after Musk specifically.
The story for Glass Onion was written before Musk's Twitter debacle so it's more of a case of fortuitous timing, but with so many viewers thinking there was a link it seems as though Johnson did a good job of nailing the type of person he was aiming for with Bron.
He said: "There’s a lot of general stuff about that sort of species of tech billionaire that went directly into [Glass Onion].
"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?"
"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."
Glass Onion is available to steam now on Netflix.
Topics: Film and TV, Daniel Craig, Elon Musk, Netflix
Joe Harker