Bong Joon-ho, a South Korean director, has postponed his American science fiction picture ‘Mickey 17’. Variety reports that the picture has been moved to 2025.
Warner Bros. has set a new release date for ‘Mickey 17’, pushing Bong Joon Ho and Robert Pattinson’s highly anticipated collaboration into 2025.
Warner Bros. has moved the sci-fi film’s release date from March 29, 2024 to January 31, 2025. According to insiders who spoke with Variety when the adjustment was announced last month, the decision to prolong the project’s timeframe was made in response to last year’s strikes and other production changes.
The new January 2025 release date also allows ‘Mickey 17’ to launch in IMAX, which would not have been possible previously because those dates were already reserved for other films. Furthermore, the revised date coincides with the Lunar New Year, a major movie-going event around the world.
According to Variety, January is also a box office dead zone, with few new releases and several large hits (such as last year’s ‘Wonka’, 2019’s ‘Aquaman’, or 2015’s ‘American Sniper’ carrying over after strong late December openings.
Thus, a long-awaited picture like ‘Mickey 17’ may benefit from pent-up demand, particularly because this release window has been successful for recent hits such as ‘M3GAN’, ‘Bad Boys for Life’, the ‘Scream’ revival, and ‘Split’. In terms of current competition, the picture debuts between ‘Paddington in Peru’, which opens in theaters in the United States on January 17, and Marvel’s ‘Captain America: Brave New World’, which opens two weeks later on February 14.
‘Mickey 17’ is Bong’s first feature film since ‘Parasite’, which became the highest-grossing Korean film in history and the first non-English language film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Bong, in addition to writing and directing, produces forthcoming films through his firm Offscreen. Additional producers include Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner of Plan B , as well as Kate Street Pictures’ Dooho Choi.
