Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Mickey 17’ Gets Release Date From Warner Bros

Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun and Naomi Ackie star in the next film from the director of “Parasite”

Warner Bros. Discovery will be releasing “Mickey 17,” an original sci-fi melodrama from Bong Joon Ho, on March 29, 2024.

The next feature from the filmmaker of “Parasite,” which became the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020, stars Robert Pattinson (“Twilight,” “Tenet”), Steven Yeun (“Minari,” “Nope”), Naomi Ackie (“The Score,” “I Want to Dance With Somebody”), Toni Collette (“The Sixth Sense,” “In Her Shoes,” “xXx: The Return of Xander Cage”) and Mark Ruffalo (“You Can Count On Me,” “13 Going On 30,” “Zodiac,” “The Avengers”). It is produced by Dooho Choi, Boon Joon Ho, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner.

While no official logline has been offered, the film is based on Edward Ashton’s novel “Mickey 7,” which concerns n expendable — and employee on a human expedition sent to colonize an ice world. After one version dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. The brief teaser offered below by Warner Bros. sees Robert Pattinson as, presumably, Mickey7 or Mickey19 being brought back/rebuilt/etc. after a fatal calamity. Watch a teaser for the film at the top of this post.

The film will mark Ho’s eighth directorial effort, and his third English-language feature following Netflix’s “Okja” in 2017 and the 2014 cult favorite “Snowpiercer” which was distributed in North America by the Weintstein Company and went on to spawn a three-seasons-and-counting TNT television show. To the extent that “Snowpiercer” was, like “The Host” (an original monster melodrama/environmental parable which got a small domestic release from Magnolia in 2007), a CJ Entertainment film, “Mickey17” will mark the legendary filmmaker’s first English-language feature with a conventional theatrically-inclined Hollywood studio.

“Mickey17” will open amid a crowded March alongside (as of this writing) Warner Bros.’ “Godzilla and Kong,” Paramount’s “A Quiet Place: Day One,” DreamWorks’ ‘Kung Fu Panda 4,” Disney’s live-action “Snow White,” Universal’s “The Fall Guy” and, on the same March 29 opening day, Sony’s “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse.”

Considering the recent handful of high profile filmmakers and executives like Walter Hamada, Chris Nolan and James Wan pitching their tents elsewhere, “Mickey17” will be a chance for David Zaslov’s Warner Bros. Discovery to show that they can still grab and keep marquee filmmakers, and (as was the case with the producers of “Crazy Rich Asians” turning down crazy-huge money from Netflix) a chance to show that the prestige of theatrical exhibition can still entice the best and brightest.

It will also be a chance for Pattinson, already acknowledged as an interesting actor by film buffs and critics while crowned a “star” among the perpetually online, can be an added value commercial element even without the Batman costume.

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