Robert Pattinson-starrer ‘Mickey 17’ release date postponed

Washington [US], February 21 (ANI): South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s directorial American science fiction film ‘Mickey 17’ has been postponed. The film has been pushed to 2025, reported Variety.

Warner Bros. has found a new release date for ‘Mickey 17’, moving Bong Joon Ho and Robert Pattinson’s highly-anticipated collaboration to 2025.

Warner Bros. has rescheduled the sci-fi film’s release date from March 29, 2024, to January 31, 2025. The decision to extend the project’s timeline, which had been impacted by last year’s strikes and other production changes, was taken, according to sources who spoke with Variety when the announcement was made about the change last month.

The new January 2025 release date also permits ‘Mickey 17’ to open in IMAX, which would not have been possible earlier because all of those dates were previously reserved for other films. Furthermore, the new date coincides with the Lunar New Year, which is a significant movie-going event worldwide.

According to Variety, January also tends to be a box office dead zone, without many new releases and many of the bigger hits (like last year’s ‘Wonka’, 2019’s ‘Aquaman’ or 2015’s ‘American Sniper’) carrying over from strong late December debuts.

Thus, a long-awaited film like ‘Mickey 17’ may benefit from pent-up demand, especially 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 film premieres between ‘Paddington in Peru’, which hits theatres in the United States on January 17, and Marvel’s ‘Captain America: Brave New World’, which will open two weeks later on February 14.

‘Mickey 17’ is Bong’s first feature since ‘Parasite’, which became the highest-grossing Korean film in history, as well as the first non-English language movie to win Best Picture at the Oscars. In addition to writing and directing, Bong also produces upcoming films through his company Offscreen. Additional producers include Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner of Plan B and Dooho Choi of Kate Street Pictures.

The film is adapted from Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel, described by publisher St. Martin Press as a high-concept cerebral thriller in the vein of ‘The Martian’ and ‘Dark Matter’. Pattinson plays an “expendable” — a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonize an ice planet — who refuses to let his replacement clone take his place. Further plot details have been kept under wraps, but its star-studded cast also includes Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo, reported Variety.