Coming off of the massive, award-winning success of Parasite, the delay of Bong Joon-ho's next film Mickey 17 has puzzled fans. It's a Bong Joon-ho movie, which tend to be a little weird, starring Robert Pattinson, who tends to be a little weird (the trailer for the movie eventually confirmed that Pattinson is making Big Choices). Knowing this, rumors began to circulate that Bong was butting heads with Warner Bros. over his cut of the film. But Bong waves off this speculation in a new Empire Magazine interview. "With Okja and now Mickey 17, I was given the final cut as part of my deal," he says. "The studio respected my final cut rights."
Bong adds that "Of course, during the editing process there are many opinions and many discussions that happen. But this film is my cut, and I’m very happy about it. It was a long process, but it was always smooth and respectful."
Mickey 17, which stars Pattinson as an expendable blue-collar worker on a space colony who is cloned every time he dies, wrapped filming in 2022. The film was originally scheduled for release in March 2024, but that got delayed in the wake of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Now it's scheduled to premiere in January 2025—which, historically, is not a great month for cinema. At the very least, it's not a time of year in which studios release their awards contender movies. By contrast, Bong's last film opened at Cannes in 2019 and won the Palme D'Or. The circumstances had a lot of people wondering, quite reasonably, how the follow-up film by an Academy Award winner for Best Director featuring an all-star cast (Pattison, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Steven Yeun, and Naomi Ackie) would end up in the movie graveyard of winter.
According to Deadline, the date was chosen "to play off Lunar New Year" in Bong's native South Korea. Furthermore, the cinema schedule is pretty open in January, so WB had no trouble locking down IMAX theaters. It's still enough to make a person curious about what went on behind the scenes, and much as Bong may deflect that the post-production process "was always smooth and respectful," Pattinson, at least, sounds impressed that they got this movie across the finish line. "It's really cool that a studio has done this film," he tells Empire, "and that Bong pushed to have the final cut on it—to make something that does feel incredibly unusual."
