Warner Bros has delayed Parasite director Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 yet again. For once, this may not be a bad thing…
For those of you eagerly awaiting Bong Joon-ho’s follow up to the Oscar-winning Parasite, this might sting a little. Despite having to endure a delay of almost a year already, Warner Bros has pushed Mickey 17 back even further into 2025.
A quick recap: Mickey 17 puts Robert Pattinson in a weird but fun looking sci-fi satire. The film was originally set to release in March of this year before the film was removed from that scheduled slot. A hold-up in post-production work was the publicly-stated reason that we got at the time, but the project has been dogged by rumours that the studio was unhappy with Bong’s movie. Some stories even suggested he may have lost final cut.
Bong eventually came out and publicly denied that report, maintaining that the final cut of the film is indeed his. However, Warner Bros’ new scheduling of the film in January of 2025 seemed to indicate a severe lack of faith in the film’s commercial and awards potential, and despite Bong’s reassurances, the film has struggled to shake off its tag as a troubled production.
From last year’s The Flash to this year’s Joker: Folie à Deux, Warner Bros’ marketing team have been handed some tough assignments over the last 18 months. The bizarre way the studio has treated Bong and his film has given the marketers another difficult job, when selling a big-budget sci-fi movie starring Batman and directed by an Oscar-winning filmmaker should have been a relatively easy win.
Perhaps somebody at Warner Bros twigged onto that, because with Lionsgate’s Michael Jackson biopic vacating its Easter date, the studio has acted quickly to fill that space: according to Deadline, Mickey 17 has now been pushed back to an April release. That means that the film can snag a decent IMAX run, not to mention that its new date improves its commercial prospects considerably. On the whole, then, this might actually help the film’s chances of reaching a wider audience. That’s not a bad thing at all, considering the wealth of talent involved and the brilliance of Edward Ashton’s (Mickey7) novel, on which the film is based.
The studio has also shifted the Drew Hancock-directed horror movie Companion back by three weeks to take over that vacated January 31st space, which means that Hancock’s film should now get an IMAX run, too. Should that film prove to be a success, perhaps we’ll see another regular horror title added to the January calendar alongside Blumhouse’s annual release (which in this case is Wolf Man, releasing in the US two weeks before Companion).
We’ll bring you more news on Mickey 17 as we hear it, but hopefully everything is now in place for the film to succeed on its own terms when it releases next Easter.
