Oldboy director Park Chan-wook is making a western, The Brigands Of Rattlecreek, which has attracted the interest of Warner Bros Clockwork at Cannes. Update: Director Park Chan-wook’s planned western, The Brigands Of Rattlecreek, has understandably picked up interest at the Cannes Film Festival. The South Korean filmmaker’s revenge saga was looking for backers at the ... Park Chan-wook’s The Brigands Of Rattlecreek is closing a deal with Warner Bros Clockwork
Oldboy director Park Chan-wook is making a western, The Brigands Of Rattlecreek, which has attracted the interest of Warner Bros Clockwork at Cannes.
Update: Director Park Chan-wook’s planned western, The Brigands Of Rattlecreek, has understandably picked up interest at the Cannes Film Festival.
The South Korean filmmaker’s revenge saga was looking for backers at the festival, and its package of director and stars has attracted the interest of Warner Bros Clockwork – the studio’s new independent arm which launched in late 2025.
(Warner had various ‘indie’ business arms in the past, including Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse; all went by the wayside following the parent company’s increasingly terrible mergers.)
According to Deadline, Clockwork is in the late stages of closing a deal worth about $15m for Chan-wook’s project, set to star Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal and Tang Wei.
The short version of the story is: an intriguing-sounding western from one of the planet’s finest directors is one step closer to happening. We’ll bring you more on its progress as it unfolds.
Our original story follows…
27th April 2026: The South Korean master of crime and suspense, Park Chan-wook, is about to turn his hand to an English-language western. As you might expect from a filmmaker of his stature, Park has lined up an impressive array of stars for his dramatically-titled The Brigands Of Rattlecreek.
Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal and Tang Wei are among the cast assembled so far, per Deadline. What’s equally eye-catching, at least for this writer, is who’s behind the script; Rattlecreek is by S Craig Zahler, who both wrote and directed the fearsome horror western, Bone Tomahawk, in 2015.
According to Deadline’s plot description, Rattlecreek is a revenge saga about a sheriff and a doctor whose town is overrun by a bunch of bandits in the middle of a storm. Some of Park’s best known films deal with the corrosive nature of revenge – most obviously his ‘vengeance trilogy’, which takes in Sympathy For Mr Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), Lady Vengeance (2005).
Park’s most recent film, No Other Choice, was a violent, blackly comic satire about the brutality of capitalism, with the employee of a paper company attempting to murder his way back into his old lifestyle following an unexpected redundancy.
The Brigands Of Rattlecreek will be Park’s first English-language film since Stoker, a chilly vampire-adjacent thriller that didn’t quite find the audience it deserved in 2013.
Park’s western needs financial backing first, however, and it’s thought that he’ll need about $60m to bankroll the film (quite a bit more than Bone Tomahawk, made for a tiny $1.8m). With all these names behind it, we’d be rather surprised if Rattlecreek didn’t find investors when it goes to market at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
We’ll keep you posted as we learn more.
