Despite numerous release date changes, Bong Joon-ho’s next film, Mickey 17, is still highly anticipated. The movie is based on the novel Mickey7 and tells the story of expendable employee Mickey (Robert Pattinson). Whenever he dies on one sort of expedition or another, a carbon copy of him is made with most memories still intact. However, things get dicey when a Mickey copy, who was thought dead, returns to base when a new Mickey has already been made. The initial trailer for the film shows only a glimpse of the chaos that ensues when the two Mickey’s come into contact.
Now, ScreenRant has shared an exclusive new image of the film as part of their 2025 Movie Preview. Bong Joon-ho is a director whose projects have received plenty of attention, especially since his 2019 film Parasite took home the Oscars for Best Picture and Best International Feature, the first non-English speaking film in history to win the former. Mickey 17 will be the director’s first feature film since winning his Oscars, making it all the more exciting.
Mickey 17 also features a stacked cast, with Robert Pattinson joined by Toni Collete, Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, and others. Compared to the more home-grown South Korean production of Parasite (which was filmed in Seoul), Mickey 17 feels like a much more significant undertaking. However, this isn’t the director’s first foray into blockbuster filmmaking, as Bong Joon-ho has two different English films under his belt.
Bong Joon-ho’s English Language Features Prepared Him for ‘Mickey 17’
Before Parasite and after his other South Korean productions like Memories of Murder, The Host, and Mother, Bong Joon-ho directed two other English features. The first was Snowpiercer, an adaptation of a graphic novel that stars Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, and Tilda Swinton. The film features impressive visual effects, choreographed action sequences, and plenty of post-apocalyptic sci-fi storytelling that addresses themes of class and social segregation.
Related
Every Movie Directed by Bong Joon-ho, Ranked
He’s worked on dozens of films working as a screenwriter or a cinematographer, but Bong Joon-ho has only released seven feature films as a director.
The second film, Okja, which Netflix distributed, featured a mix of South Korean and American actors while also maintaining some of Snowpiercer’s sci-fi action adventure themes. The film’s main premise also centers around a giant CGI pig, which further proves that Bong Joon-ho isn’t a stranger to higher-budgeted films and more visual effects-heavy storytelling. Given that Mickey 17 is set in space and features clones of Robert Pattinson, it seems that the Parasite director hasn’t strayed too far from the films he’s made in the past.
Overall, Mickey 17 is like a culmination of Bong Joon-ho’s previous works. The director has proven that he’s comfortable in the realm of the sci-fi genre in big and small projects, and his new upcoming film looks like it will address similar themes of class struggle that Parasite was imbued with, only on a much more epic scale. Moreover, with the film being advertised as being released in premium large format theaters like IMAX, it’s clear that the director is looking to tell a big and ambitious sci-fi story that shouldn’t be missed.
Adapted from the novel by Edward Ashton, Mickey 7 is a Sci-Fi film that follows Mickey 17 (Robert Pattinson) and his journey to the ice world Niflheim to colonize the planet. Mickey 17 is an “expendable” employee to be used and thrown away after completing their task – often a dangerous one – but when one iteration of Mickey dies, he is reborn in a new body with a large portion of his memories still intact. After six deaths, however, Mickey finally begins to understand the job and why it was always an unfilled position.