Watch the trailer for Bong Joon-ho's long-awaited next masterpiece: Mickey 17

Bong Joon-ho is on one hell of a hot streak. The South Korean filmmaker had already been turning out good stuff for a while when his 2013 sci-fi hit Snowpiercer brought him international acclaim, and he hasn't let off the gas since. Okja was a heartwarming takedown of the livestock industry and Parasite was a piercing class satire that became the first non-English language film to win an Oscar for Best Picture. In a world where Hollywood seems to only want to make reboots and sequels, Bong Joon-ho keeps coming up with original ideas and executing on them flawlessly. That's worth paying attention to.

He's working in English again for Mickey 17, about a down-on-his-luck earthling who signs up to be an "expendable," meaning he's assigned dangerous tasks and cloned back to life when he inevitably dies...over and over again, at least 17 times. This is Mickey, played by Robert Pattison, who after playing Batman is on a bit of a hot streak himself. Things get complicated when, somehow, there end up being different versions of Mickey alive at the same time. Watch the trailer above!

You never know what you're going to get with Bong Joon-ho. He's clearly in a comic mode here, and might be watching a lot of mob movies? The tone of the trailer reminds me of Goodfellas, what with the narration and Frank Sinatra soundtrack. And also there's a guy dressed as a giant pigeon at the 1:48 mark! We all saw him. What's that about?

The supporting cast is impressive, featuring returning Bong Joon-ho players like Steven Yeun as well as newcomers like Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo. At this point, I'll watch pretty much anything Bong Joon-ho makes, but the presence of some heavy-weight acting talent doesn't hurt.

Mickey 17 was originally going to come out in March of this year, but was pushed back for reasons unknown and hopefully unfounded; it now officially hits theaters on January 31, 2025. And if you want to know how it all started, you can always read the book that inspired the movie, Mickey7 by Edward Ashton.

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