Mickey 17: Bong Joon-Ho’s Film With Robert Pattinson Will Arrive In 2025
Initially scheduled for March 29 this year, at the beginning of 2024 the news arrived that Mickey 17, the highly anticipated new film by Bong Joon-ho starring Robert Pattinson, has been officially postponed. Now, Warner Bros. has announced the new release date of the film, which will arrive in American theaters on January 31, 2025. Furthermore, the film’s release in IMAX theaters has also been confirmed. Just before the pandemic hit, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho made history in contemporary cinema after his film Parasites became the first non-English-language work to win this award.
The director, spearhead of the ‘new wave of Korean cinema’, had already flirted with Hollywood in Snowpiercer, with a very international cast, and in Okja, which was a Netflix original. After establishing yourself and earning a place among the most important directors of your generation… what would be the next step? Bong Joon-ho has never made it easy for himself and, as it could not be otherwise, his next project does not fall within the traditional standards of the North American industry, even though it is a Warner Bros. production.
What Do We Know About Mickey 17?
Mickey 17 will be based on the sci-fi novel “Mickey7” by Edward Ashton, described as a mix between “The Martian” by Andy Wier and “Dark Matter” by Black Crouch. The novel tells the story of an “expendable” disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonize the ice world Nifheim who refuses to allow his clone, Mickey8, to take his place. We remind you that the cast of the film also includes Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Ackie, and Steven Yeun, who had already collaborated with the director in Okja, available on Netflix. Bong Joon-ho’s latest film, Parasite, earned high praise and took home numerous awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay at the 2020 Oscars. The director is currently working on a miniseries based on the film for HBO.
What ‘Mickey17’ is About?
It is the adaptation of the science fiction novel Mickey7, by Edward Ashton (although the original title of the film has changed to Mickey 17) and promises to be one of the big films of next year, starring Robert Pattinson, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. The original novel was published in 2022 in our country by Minotauro and in which we enter the frozen and practically uninhabitable planet called Niflheim. There, Mickey Barney is one of his colonizers and is considered ‘expendable’, since it is the seventh replica that has been made of his body. No one has gone this far, which is why some consider him an anomaly, others immortal, but the truth is that he has become a kind of atypical legend that everyone is suspicious of.
Over the last few years he has been tasked with carrying out the most dangerous tasks possible, has been the subject of numerous experiments, and has always come out alive. Ultimately, he has sacrificed his humanity for the greater good. But his story has just begun. On a reconnaissance mission, Mickey will be shot down and abandoned. Waiting for his death, a species native to the planet will rescue him. When he returns to the base, he will meet the next replica of him, Mickey and neither of them is willing to be sacrificed.
In the novel, we can identify some of the constitutive features of Bong Joon-ho’s cinema, such as class struggle and rebellion against the system. All this through characters who embody survival values beyond their means, see The Host, in which an ordinary Korean family had to face a sea monster that emerged from the depths. But there is also the reflection on the system in which we live, on humanity, what makes us sensitive beings or mere robots, as well as the environmental background, on inhospitable environments that condition us as a species.
