The following contains spoilers for Glass Onion.
Netflix’s Glass Onion is yet another whodunit triumph for Rian Johnson and his detective creation Benoit Blanc. Like Knives Out before it, Glass Onion puts some twists in the classic whodunit formula, which results in the guilty party almost getting away with it, until a (literally) explosive finish seals his fate. However, it turns out that the movie almost included a post-credits scene that would have completely changed that ending.
In a recent episode of the Empire Spoiler Specials podcast (via comicbook.com) Rian Johnson reveals that he shot, but decided not to use, a post-credits scene that would have included Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc on the phone, speaking with the Mona Lisa’s home, the Louvre museum. In the scene we would have learned that the Mona Lisa we saw destroyed at the end was not the real paining, and the masterpiece was, in fact, safe at home. Johnson said…
We also shot a little coda which we decided not to use, with Blanc on the phone speaking French and getting a little affirmation of ‘ah, oui, oui, merci’ and cutting to an office in the Louvre where the real Mona Lisa is, with the security guards saying ‘Well, back to work.’ But that pulls a punch, I like that the real painting gets destroyed in the movie.
Even in a fictional movie, it was quite the flex to have the actual Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world, burned to ash in an explosion. Knowing that, it maybe makes some sense to pull back on that and reveal that, don’t worry, the painting is fine. If you’re an art lover, the idea that even fictional people may have lost access to the Mona Lisa is perhaps a little sad. Unless you’re talking about Ryan Gosling’s kids.
But as Rian Johnson says, that really lessens the impact of the ending of Glass Onion in a way that would just make it less satisfying. The whole idea is that Edward Norton’s character, while perhaps not going to prison for murder, has now seen his life destroyed due to the fact that his newly engineered fuel source is responsible for the destruction of the painting. If the painting wasn’t destroyed the ending just means less.
It’s the beauty of telling stories like this, that you can just go ahead and burn up the Mona Lisa because it’s all fiction anyway so there’s no reason not to. While a movie like Glass Onion is taking place ostensibly in our reality, the truth is that it doesn’t have to be an exact recreation of our world. The fact that the third Benoit Blanc movie from Rian Johnson will take place in a world where the Mona Lisa no longer exists is not going to make the movie feel any less real.