Remember that split second in 2020 when Bong Joon-ho and Parasite, a good movie people actually saw, won all the Oscars, and for a moment, pop culture was fun and enjoyable? Good times, good times.
Well, anyway, Bong Joon-ho is preparing his next project, and it looks like an adaptation of Edward Ashton’s upcoming novel, Mickey7, which will probably star a post-Batman Robert Pattinson. Mickey7 is a sci-fi novel set to come out this year, about a clone who regenerates after every death and retains memories from his previous iteration. He gets assigned all the dangerous jobs on space colonization missions, and the class parable pretty well writes itself. Bong has been liberal with adaptations in the past, though, so there’s no guarantee his film strongly resembles Ashton’s book, but it’s a cool concept and good things happen when Bong dives into sci-fi. The new film will be produced with Brad Pitt’s Plan B shingle, they previously worked with Bong on Okja (one of those good sci-fi things he’s made).
All the prestige pieces are lining up, and you know everyone’s going to just assume Bong’s first post-Parasite film will be a major awards contender before even one frame is shot, but you know what? I’m calling it now, before one frame is shot: this is going to be weird as hell. Yes, Bong Joon-ho can make masterpieces like Parasite and Memories of Murder. But he can also make movies in which Chris Evans says, “Babies taste best” (which is a dramatic moment but also just really funny out of context), and Jake Gyllenhaal does whatever the hell this is:
And Robert Pattinson is an actor who delights in strange, intense performances, and yes, I count Edward Cullen, Ultimate Vampire Weirdo, on this list. The combination of Bong’s sensibility of taking sci-fi concepts to their furthest possible dramatic boundaries, and Pattinson’s devotion to being just the weirdest f-cking guy on screen, is going to give us something magical. Something good? I dunno, we’ll see. Hopefully! But definitely magical. And weird. So, incredibly, inevitably weird.
