When you're a stellar sleuth renowned for solving complex cases, what's your holy grail? That question will soon be answered in the Knives Out world. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is the third film in the detective franchise and will arrive before 2025 is out — and in its just-dropped initial sneak peek, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, Queer) is excited about "the impossible crime".

Netflix has unveiled its first look at Wake Up Dead Man in a date-announcement teaser, which reveals Friday, December 12, 2025 as the day that you'll be watching. Accordingly, this trailer is short on plot details — but there are snippets of what's in store, including a church and its graveyard featuring prominently. Also included: a glimpse at much of the characteristically stacked cast. Just like in 2019's OG Knives Out and 2022's Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Blanc keeps pointing the finger at well-known faces.

Onboard this time around: Josh O'Connor (Challengers), Glenn Close (Back in Action), Josh Brolin (Brothers), Mila Kunis (Goodrich), Jeremy Renner (Mayor of Kingstown), Kerry Washington (Shadow Force), Andrew Scott (Ripley), Cailee Spaeny (Civil War), Daryl McCormack (Bad Sisters) and Thomas Haden Church (Twisted Metal). The new teaser also includes character names, including advising that O'Connor plays a reverend and Renner a doctor.

The whodunnit saga's writer and director Rian Johnson (Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi) is back behind the lens on what is being teased as Blanc's "most dangerous case yet" — and he's giving audiences two big sleuthing returns in the same year, given that Poker Face, which he also created, has already made a comeback in 2025.

So far, the Knives Out franchise has stuck to a three-yearly pattern. Also, although Johnson has plunged his detective into a familiar setup, he's always ensured that the end result was anything but routine. His trusty scenario to date: bringing a group of people together in a specific setting, then watching on when one thing that always occurs in a whodunnit happens. That'd be a murder, in a formula that Agatha Christie also loved, as book-to-film adaptations Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and A Haunting in Venice have shown. The author's play The Mousetrap and 2022 flick See How They Run, which riffs on it, make the same point. And, so does this clearly Christie-inspired franchise.

The cast across Knives Out and Glass Onion has always been impressive. Chris Evans (Red One), Ana de Armas (Ghosted), Jamie Lee Curtis (The Last Showgirl), Michael Shannon (A Different Man), Toni Collette (Mickey 17), Don Johnson (Doctor Odyssey), Lakeith Stanfield (The Changeling), Christopher Plummer (Departure), Katherine Langford (Savage River) and Jaeden Martell (Arcadian) all featured the first time around. In the second flick, Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown), Janelle Monáe (Antebellum), Kathryn Hahn (The Studio), Leslie Odom Jr (The Exorcist: Believer), Jessica Henwick (The Royal Hotel), Madelyn Cline (Outer Banks), Kate Hudson (Running Point) and Dave Bautista (Dune: Part Two) co-starred.

Check out the date announcement video for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery below:

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery will release on Friday, December 12, 2025. Read our reviews of Knives Out and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.