The first trailer for Mickey 17 is here and it looks incredible. The next movie from Parasite director Bong Joon-ho, it’s a sci-fi clone-killing conceit in space that will make The Batman star Robert Pattinson the butt of the violent joke when it hits theaters January 31, 2025.
Based on the 2022 science fiction novel by Edward Ashton, Mickey 17 follows the titular underdog played by Pattinson as he signs up to be an “expendable” in some future dystopia. What that means is that he doubles as space janitor and science experiment, taking all the most dangerous jobs aboard a colony ship and allegedly contributing to humanity’s understanding of the universe every time he’s cloned, killed, and reborn in a new body. Until eventually one of those clones doesn’t die and the Mickeys seemingly rise up.
Here’s the trailer:
Alongside Pattinson is Naomi Ackie (Star Wars: Episode IX), Steven Yeun (Nope), Toni Collette (Hereditary), and Mark Ruffalo (Avengers). We’ve seen the clone idea played out a bit in Christopher Nolan’s Prestige and Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow (an adaptation of the manga All You Need is Kill). Here, writer and director Bong Joon-ho is taking it into a sci-fi dystopia via Ashton’s book not unlike his English language breakout Snowpiercer about industrial class warfare at the end of the world (which was also adapted from a novel).
Class warfare was also one of the themes of Parasite, Bong Joon-ho’s 2020 Oscar winner about a a poor family infiltrating the household of upper-class elites. It’s also nice to see Pattinson continuing to stretch his wings again after his brooding portrayal of Bruce Wayne in the most recent Batman movie. With the surreal black-and-white thriller The Lighthouse, the former Twilight actor proved he can balance on the knife’s edge of comedy and horror as well as anyone.
