After a director wins an Oscar, the world is their oyster. More so than maybe any other time in their career, they have the chance to basically work on anything or with anyone. And in the case of Parasite director Bong Joon Ho, he’s decided to work with the star of The Batman.
Deadline reports that the Oscar-winning filmmaker — whose other credits include Snowpiercer, The Host, and Memories of Murder — is in talks to write and direct an untitled film based on an upcoming sci-fi novel called Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, and he’s likely to get Robert Pattinson to star.
The premise for Mickey7 is incredibly cool. Mickey is a clone that is used for dangerous work. If one dies, it’s fine. They just make another Mickey. Then on a particularly dangerous space mission, Mickey7 is thought to be dead, only he’s not, and when he returns he sees there’s a new Mickey — which then causes some problems. You can read more details over on Amazon where you can also pre-order the book, which comes out in February. Deadline notes, however, that “While the film will be inspired by the novel, sources say given Bong’s past experiences with adaptations, his iteration of the story might ultimately may be different from novel’s.”
While Pattinson is most often thought of as a movie star — which will only continue with March’s release of Matt Reeves’ The Batman — it’s easy to forget that in between projects like The Batman, Tenet, and all the Twilights, he’s often worked with excellent directors on small films. Good Time with the Safdie brothers, High Life with Claire Denis, Cosmopolis with David Cronenberg, the list goes on and on. You get the sense Pattinson far prefers heady, interesting material over big blockbuster filmmaking. So that he’d want to work with Bong, and that Bong would be interested in working with Pattinson, seems like a match made in the heavens. With a whole bunch of clones.
No work on when the untitled adaptation of Mickey7 might go into production, but with The Batman press starting to ramp up, we’re likely to hear sooner rather than later.