There was a meme going around recently, which sounds like how a well-meaning but out of touch stepfather might start a conversation with his surly and distant stepson, involving Benoit Blanc and The Muppets. The idea was that Netflix’s Knives Out 3 should be an all Muppet cast aside from Daniel Craig as the very human Blanc, a la Michael Caine in A Muppet Christmas Carol. Perhaps ‘meme’ is a little generous. More accurate would be that one persona suggested this, got a lot of laughs (or at least a lot of likes on Twitter, which is how we display mirth to strangers these days) and, hungry for serotonin, attention, and those delicious, soul-warming likes, several others copied the idea and appeared to present it as their own. All this is to say I'm stealing the idea but replacing 'Muppets' with 'video game characters'.
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You might say that seems unrealistic. To which I say a) so are Muppets, b) get off my back, and c) I refer you to point b). You might also say it's stupid. To which I refer you back to points b) through c), and remind you that stupid is kind of what I do. I took a squad of video game characters to the World Cup and bought them presents for Christmas. If you don't like it, click somewhere else (but ideally somewhere else on TheGamer – every little helps). Anyway, onward. For this dress-up as casting director, I tried not to replace specific characters already in the two Knives Out movies with video game stars, but to think of the essence of Knives Out. Big, almost caricaturish characters propped up by heart, and a sense of detachment from the world that somehow grounds them in it.
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First off, we need a victim at the core of it all. In Knives Out, the victim dies near the start, and with Glass Onion it's a little more complex, but typically victims need to make a grand impression in the early stages to sustain audiences for the whole movie. It needs to be a character who is short, fast, and loud. Sonic is our murder victim.
In both Knives Out movies so far, Blanc has been assisted by a female companion who seems to be in way over her head but turns out to be the key to the whole affair. First it was Ana de Armas, then it was Janelle Monae, and now it is Lara Croft. We've already done the whole mansion thing, so it won't be set in Croft Manor, but Lara still seems a solid choice for Blanc's right hand woman.
Then we have the supporting cast. They need to be easily definable by straightforward tropes but never quite play up to said tropes. They need to leave an instant impression, but then pull away from that impression without ever coming across as deceptive. We need a smart character who turns out to be stupid (Aiden Pearce, who can hack any computer in the world but can barely tie his shoelaces), a stupid character who turns out to be smart (Claude von Riegen), and a stupid character who is in fact just stupid (Crash Bandicoot). We also need a character who is darkly charming and disarmingly attractive, though not particularly trustworthy (Sephiroth), as well as a stoic, gruff character who reveals more of themselves as the mystery unfolds (this describes around 80 percent of all video game protagonists, but let's say Geralt).
There's a lot of men in the cast right now, and while that might be an accurate tribute to the mainly male Muppets, we should probably address the balance a little. Aloy, Princess Peach, and Miranda Lawson all have that perfect Knives Out-ness of mistakenly believing themselves to be the most important and interesting person in the room. I said I wasn't going to find replacements for existing cast members but they fit pretty well into the roles of Katherine Langford, Kate Hudson, and Kathryn Hahn already.
As for whodunit, well, that's for you to figure out, isn't it? The first Knives Out was a fairly classic mystery, with the sequel a more deconstructed satirical drama built around a murder case, but the whole point of these movies is that you don't know whodunit until you find out whodunit. But it was probably Sephiroth.