The film industry will tell you Mickey 17 is risky business – but recent box office receipts might not back that up…
Whether or not the rumoured disputes surrounding Mickey 17’s final cut prove to be true, it’s not hard to see why Bong Joon-ho’s latest sci-fi would have Warner Bros worried.
Set in a near-future world where a wealthy, orange charisma vacuum leads a white supremacist eugenicist cult to colonise a distant planet (imagine), the director’s Parasite follow-up is the most flagrantly political blockbuster to come out of a major studio in years. More to the point, it’s an essentially original sci-fi story in an age where that sort of thing has a reputation for losing everyone a lot of money.
Deadline has called the film’s global box office outlook “tricky”. Screen Rant has labelled it “one of 2025’s riskiest box office bets”. Variety has described it as “arthouse”, which has nothing to do with its financial performance, but does make me wonder how far the Overton window on that word has moved recently. The general consensus seems to be that the $118m project is far from a safe financial bet.
Which is odd, considering the dearth of examples to back that sentiment up. Sure, the days when E.T. or Close Encounters could make a squillion dollars and top the box office might be over – but even in a particularly unfriendly post-pandemic landscape, the few sci-fi blockbusters to sneak through the studio system have hardly brought anyone close to bankruptcy.
Since 2020, we’ve had The Creator ($104m from an $80m budget), but also Nope ($171m from $68m) and Dune ($407m from $165m). All three were wide-release, studio backed films based on either an original idea or a 1965 novel, and two out of three made twice their budget in cinemas. I’m not even counting Dune: Part Two, which ended its run as one of the highest-grossing films of last year.
Read more: Mickey 17 review | Another Bong hit
In the interests of getting the numbers up into statistically significant territory, we can even expand our definition of blockbuster sci-fi a little bit. Moonfall (not studio-backed) made $67.3m from a $150m budget; Megalopolis (genuinely more arthouse than blockbuster) made just $14.3m. Joining the M-club is M3GAN (marketed as a horror, but it’s not scary and the main character is a robot, so I’m counting it), which made $181m out of $12m and a TikTok dance. By that logic, there’s also little reason to exclude The Wild Robot ($333m from $78m) other than it isn’t explicitly targeting sci-fi’s usual audience.
By my (admittedly shaky) napkin maths, that puts the genre’s post-pandemic success rate hovering just above the 50% mark. Meanwhile, of the 22 DC and Marvel comic book movies to emerge since 2020, 11 have made their budget back twice over in cinemas (assuming Captain America: Brave New World crosses that milestone in the next week or so). The potential profits are generally much higher on these projects of course, but so are the losses – Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania cost Disney as much as $388m to produce, more than both Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies combined.
Comparing original sci-fi to a genre famously experiencing a bit of a low ebb might not mean much, of course. But with studios more averse to risk-taking than ever, it’s worth pointing out that the riskiest bets might not be where we expect. Good luck to Mickey 17, then – I hope it makes more money than Megalopolis.
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