CinemaCon is now underway – it’s the annual convention in Las Vegas where the studios present exclusive previews of their upcoming releases to theatre owners to build anticipation. Yesterday Robert Pattinson made an appearance alongside Bong Joon-ho for their film Mickey 17.
If not for last year’s strikes, Mickey 17 would have been released by now. It is Bong Joon-ho’s first film since he won the Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture for Parasite. Needless to say, there are a lot of people who’ve been waiting for this project, based on the book Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton. Robert plays a space expendable, clones who do the most dangerous work in space and are destroyed once they’re no longer useful. For the film adaptation, Bong Joon-ho has increased the number of Robert Pattinsons. As he explained, per The Hollywood Reporter:
“The number is the number of times he dies. I killed him ten times more,” Bong said to laughs from the crowd. “It’s a sci-fi movie, but it’s a human story.”
RP is playing two Mickeys in the film – number 17 and number 18, each with different personality traits and voices. You can imagine how this press tour will be, right? As Sarah has already noted, RP is known for going off the rails during interviews, sometimes making sh-t up just to entertain himself. And he’ll be promoting a film in which 17 and 18, who are not quite the same, have to pretend to be the same to avoid elimination because they can exist at the same time.
There’s been a lot of positive reaction to the footage that was shared, which is not surprising. It’s Bong Joon-ho, and he’s working with an actor who’s made a name for himself for being game for weird sh-t. So what’s even more weird is the release date – as mentioned, Mickey 17 was supposed to be released last month, and now they’ve pushed it to…
January 31st, 2025.
Everyone’s now all like “huh? WTF?” because January releases aren’t usually met with a lot of optimism and yet, they’re at CinemaCon so obviously, with that reported $150 million budget, Warner Bros has some investment in ensuring it will perform well. So what’s with the January slot?
They’re saying it’s because of IMAX availability and that it can’t be any earlier, so they’re scheduling it around Lunar New Year instead. And hoping that since the January box office is usually dead, Mickey17 could benefit from a slow marketplace. But it’s possible that they could release in theatres a month earlier, like during this coming holiday season, to make it eligible for awards consideration?
Judging from these photos and their general behaviour around each other, Bong Joon-ho and Robert Pattinson look like they get on quite well. Like I said, I can’t wait for this press tour, and for them to release whatever it is that they showed at CinemaCon to the rest of us.