If Netflix wants to make a billion dollars, all it needs to is convince writer-director Rian Johnson to make a Knives Out movie starring the Muppets, alongside Daniel Craig as flamboyant detective Benoit Blanc. There’s just one problem: Johnson doesn’t seem particularly interested.

"It's not a bad idea,” he recently told The Hollywood Reporter when asked about the internet’s favorite Knives Out fan-casting. “But I love and respect Muppet movies too much. The reality is, if you put Muppets in a Benoit Blanc movie, it would feel totally wrong, because they would be getting murdered. The alternative is to just stick Benoit Blanc into a Muppet movie, which admittedly would be very fun, but would kind of break the reality of what Blanc is."

Here’s the thing, though: Johnson is wrong about the Muppets. And having watched his latest Knives Out/Benoit Blanc installment, Wake Up Dead Man, I think he might also be wrong about his own movies. (And before you even mention it, yes I’ve seen the Sesame Street Knives Out sketch. But Sesame Street and the Muppets are two entirely different things with very different tones, so I’ll be ignoring that in this article.)

If you consider the entire history of the 70-year Muppets franchise, not only does it become apparent that the........

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