‘Mickey 17′ Is Warner Bros.’ Big Budget Box Office Bet on Bong Joon-ho

Five years after making history with his Oscar triumph for “Parasite,” Bong Joon-ho has returned to Hollywood filmmaking with Warner Bros.’ “Mickey 17,” a star-studded sci-fi satire about how capitalism can create demagogues and cheapen human life.

But despite strong reviews, it faces an uphill battle to turn a profit against its reported $118 million budget. While not an original film — it is an adaptation of the 2022 Edward Ashton novel “Mickey 7” — it’s a film trying to win over adult audiences with a marketing campaign based around its darkly humorous concept and a go-for-broke lead performance by Robert Pattinson.

While not as acclaimed as “Parasite,” reviews for “Mickey 17” have been very positive, currently standing at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film has also earned a $9 million 4-day opening weekend in Bong’s home country of South Korea, the best for a Warner release in six years.

But projections for the film’s opening weekend remain low for its budget level, standing at $20 million domestic and $45 million worldwide. At such a start, “Mickey 17” would need some of the best legs of any film this year to match the $258 million global total of “Parasite,” which was produced on a tenth of the budget of “Mickey 17.”

This film was announced in January 2022 shortly before the release of Ashton’s novel and was one of the last major projects greenlit by Warner’s then-film chairman Toby Emmerich prior to his departure in June of that year with the merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery. Production of “Mickey 17” was then overseen by the current motion picture group chairs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy.

While not initially greenlit by them, “Mickey 17” fits into De Luca and Abdy’s larger vision for Warner Bros., both with its franchise staple and the original films it has on its slate. From James Gunn’s “Superman” and Ryan Coogler’s horror film “Sinners” to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” many of the studio’s most prominent releases this year are driven by a director with a distinct filmmaking style.

This is a vision that predates De Luca and Abdy, as plenty of Warner’s recent big hits like Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Paul King’s “Wonka” — as well as costly busts like George Miller’s “Furiosa” and Todd Phillips “Joker: Folie a Deux” — had a distinct authorial voice. But the current chairmen have doubled down on this, making their stable of directors the centerpiece of last year’s CinemaCon presentation.

Now the question is how to sell those unique visions to a moviegoing public that has proven to be almost as risk-averse and money-conscious as Hollywood itself. “Superman” is obviously an easy sell, but a genre-defying sci-fi film with heaps of black humor and plenty of scenes of Pattinson convulsing, puking blood, and repeatedly dying — not to mention Mark Ruffalo’s performance as a wealthy antagonist that is clearly channeling Donald Trump — is a much trickier challenge.

Part of this is simply because of who Bong Joon-ho is as a filmmaker. As his past genre work like the 2006 monster film “The Host” and the 2017 Netflix animal rights science fantasy “Okja” demonstrated, the Korean auteur delights in breaking genre conventions with wild tone swings between and sometimes within scenes.

It is what has made Bong into one of his country’s most globally respected filmmakers, but it also makes films like “Mickey 17” difficult to sell in an easy package to the masses. This can be seen in the trailers for the film, as the first English trailer highlights its dark humor with Mickey’s multiple deaths set to Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head.” But the film’s Korean trailer sells its more dramatic elements with more intense music.

As seen with films like Neon’s recent horror release “The Monkey,” audience reception can sometimes be more negative than critics on a film if some moviegoers feel that what they got for their ticket price wasn’t what was sold in the marketing. Bong has built up a loyal following, but any hopes “Mickey 17” has of breaking even theatrically will come down to whether a wider swath of audiences who have either only seen “Parasite” or perhaps none of his previous work are willing to go along with the myriad twists and turns of this sharp satire.

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