Warner Bros. Pictures confirmed today that Snowpiercer and The Host writer-director Bong Joon-ho is currently shooting his follow-up to his Best Picture-winning 2019 class satire Parasite. The film, a science fiction story called Mickey 17, will star Robert Pattinson in the title role. No summary of the movie’s plot was immediately available, but Warner Bros. reports that Bong wrote the script as an adaptation of the 2022 book Mickey 7, by Edward Ashton. Marvel Cinematic Universe star Mark Ruffalo will co-star, alongside Nope’s Steven Yeun, Hereditary star Toni Collette, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’s Naomi Ackie.
Mickey 7 centers on a cloned worker, called an “Expendable,” who becomes aware through multiple iterations of his life that he’s being sent on a series of highly dangerous missions because he’s easily replaceable. After one of these missions, he returns to discover that his replacement, Mickey 8, has already reported for duty. It’s a scenario that may immediately bring previous movies to mind for sci-fi fans — Duncan Jones’ Moon and Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion both feature “disposable” space workers learning unpleasant truths about their mission and their situation.
Bong is likely to have his own strong spin on this material, given his habit of putting his own life and work into movies like Parasite. (Look, he’s already added 10 whole-ass Mickeys to the equation.) Ashton’s scenario seems particularly well suited to a writer-director who’s consistently made movies about class and income inequity, society’s lower classes and outcasts, and the struggle to find justice and recognition in an imbalanced society. The idea of a worker created to serve more privileged people, and die for them in the process, seems right up his alley. We’ll have to wait more than a year to see what his version of the story looks like, though. Mickey 17 is slated for worldwide release on March 29, 2024.
