Bong Joon-ho: Okja, Snowpiercer, Mickey 17 and the Parasite Puzzle

Bong Joon-ho does not make things easy for his audience. I never warmed to “Mickey 17”, and “Snowpiercer” reached me less than it reached many colleagues. “Okja”, on the other hand, is for me among his strongest work.

De gustibus non est disputandum. About Bong, one can.

For anyone who knows him only by name: Bong was born in Daegu in 1969, studied sociology and built his career on genre films – the crime thriller “Memories of Murder” (2003) and the monster film “The Host” (2006), at the time the most successful film in South Korean history. In 2019, “Parasite” became the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes, and a few months later it won four Oscars, including the first Best Picture ever awarded to a film not in English. Accepting the Golden Globe in January 2020, Bong told the audience that once viewers get past the “one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles”, a whole world of films opens up.

Before and after that came three films that are less known in Europe. They say a great deal about how he works.

“Okja”: booing a logo

In 2017, “Okja” ran in competition at Cannes. A Korean girl, Mija, tries to save her giant pig from a meat corporation. Netflix had paid for it, around 50 million dollars according to industry reports. There was no regular cinema release in France – in France, roughly like opening a Viennese coffee house without newspapers.

At the press screening, the Netflix logo was booed. Then the film ran in the wrong aspect ratio, the screening was stopped and restarted – and the logo was booed a second time.

Bong took it calmly. This way, he said afterwards, everyone got to see the opening twice, and it was full of information anyway. That is called grace. Or press conference experience.

Jury president Pedro Almodóvar said a film not shown in cinemas should not win the Palme d’Or. And the festival changed its rules: since 2018, every film in competition must be released in French cinemas. One film rewrote the statutes of Cannes without winning a prize.

Nobody brought home the bacon that day. Least of all Netflix.

There was another side. Tilda Swinton, who plays the corporate chief in “Okja” and co-produced the film, defended Netflix: the company had given Bong free rein on a large budget. And one critic doubted that such an idiosyncratic film would ever have earned back a wide theatrical release.

Mija was played by Ahn Seo-hyun, then 13. She said in Cannes that before the shoot she had loved eating pork. Afterwards, she understood better what animals go through. A film cannot ask for more.

For me, “Okja” is Bong’s most socially critical film: the meat industry, corporate power and animal welfare, told from the point of view of a child who wants nothing but her animal back. That it becomes a moving film rather than a thesis is Bong’s real art.

Tilda Swinton and the teeth

Swinton and Bong met at Cannes in 2011, over breakfast. She was there in competition with “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, he was sitting on a jury. They assured each other they were fans and agreed to work together.

The problem: the “Snowpiercer” script had no part for her. So Bong rewrote one. Mason, right hand to the ruler of the train, had been conceived as a middle-aged man. Bong made the character a woman.

A productive breakfast.

Swinton brought her own ideas – by Bong’s account, more than he wanted: she proposed pulling her nose up into a pig’s snout. Bong asked her to stop. What remained were a wig, glasses and a set of false teeth that Swinton herself called the real star of the character.

One tries to imagine that conversation in an Austrian casting session.

“Snowpiercer”: a French comic, shot in Prague

The source is European: “Le Transperceneige”, a French comic by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette from 1982, which Bong discovered in a bookshop in Seoul. After a new ice age, the last humans survive on a train that circles the earth without stopping – the poor at the back, the rich at the front.

It was shot in early 2013 on a large sound stage in Prague, with Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt and Song Kang-ho. At around 40 million dollars, it was the most expensive Korean production up to then. Before release, it had been sold to 167 countries, more than any Korean film before it. In Korea it quickly took around 65 million dollars, and it also did well in France.

In the US, things got difficult. Harvey Weinstein’s distribution company reportedly wanted to cut 20 minutes. Bong defended his version like a position under fire and held it. It reached American cinemas, though only in a small release.

A Korean director adapts a French comic in the Czech Republic. This is what Europe as a location looks like when the marching orders come from Seoul.

“Mickey 17”: expensive, clever, no audience

“Mickey 17” is based on Edward Ashton’s novel “Mickey7”. Robert Pattinson plays an “expendable”: a worker on a mission to colonise an ice planet who dies again and again and is reprinted each time. It premiered at the Berlinale in 2025, financed by Warner Bros.

The reviews were mostly good. The balance sheet was not. According to Variety, the film cost 118 million dollars after tax rebates, plus around 80 million for marketing. To break even in cinemas it would have needed about 300 million. The final projection was around 143 million, with an estimated loss of 75 to 80 million dollars. A source close to the film called that estimate too high.

Per aspera ad astra, as the Romans said. “Mickey 17” got as far as the aspera.

I can understand the audience’s reluctance. “Mickey 17” criticises on every level at once: working conditions, power, colonisation, and the idea that a person can be reprinted once used up. It is cleverly conceived. It is not easy to bear.

Why “Parasite” worked – a hypothesis

I saw “Parasite” in a Vienna cinema, and rarely has so much come together for me in one film: pitch-black humour, malice and precise social analysis. At first, the audience laughed heartily. As the evening went on, the laughter caught in many throats.

I already knew the film and knew what was coming. Most of the audience apparently did not.

Why did it work so well? Caution is required here. Success can always be explained in hindsight, like a crime novel read backwards: the culprit was suspicious from the start. So, just an observation.

“Parasite” is a Korean production. Two families, two houses, almost everything in Korean. The film was not built for export. Its route into the world was – more on that in a moment.

The films in which Bong tells Western stories with Western partners have a different history: large budgets, international stars, a lot of English – and each time a partner with its own logic. Netflix gave freedom but no cinema release. Weinstein wanted to cut. Warner gave a lot of money that had to come back.

My hypothesis: Bong is strongest where he has to explain least. He does not think in boxes, and that is his greatest talent. With a very large budget, exactly that becomes a risk.

The more local Bong’s story, the further his films travel.

No accident

Success favours the prepared. With “Parasite”, the preparation took half a year and had the air of a military campaign.

The US distributor Neon bought the American rights at the script stage, before shooting had even begun. Neon’s head, Tom Quinn, already knew Bong: years earlier he had helped get “Snowpiercer” into American cinemas after all.

The film was financed by CJ Entertainment. Its executive producer was Miky Lee, vice chair of CJ Group and granddaughter of the founder of Samsung. When “Parasite” won Best Picture, she gave the final acceptance speech. Where her group comes from and how it found its way into film is the subject of The Sugar That Paid for Parasite.

Then the Oscar campaign: it began in August 2019 and ran until the ceremony on 9 February 2020, carried by Neon, the production company Barunson E&A and CJ ENM. According to Bong, he and his lead actor Song Kang-ho gave more than 600 interviews and over 100 audience Q&As. Competing films had billboards in Los Angeles and full-page newspaper ads. The “Parasite” team had the smaller war chest and relied on stamina. Bong himself called it guerrilla warfare. On some evenings, he said, they had nosebleeds from exhaustion.

Nothing left to chance, even without the biggest army. That is the real lesson.

At the same Golden Globes, incidentally, Bong remarked on the red carpet that BTS had three thousand times his power and influence – more on that in The Rise of K-Pop and BTS.

What producers can take from it

The budget has to match the audience a film actually has. Variety calculated that “Mickey 17” would have been well positioned at a cost of around 50 million. Same film, different story.

The distribution route shapes what a film is allowed to be. Netflix gave Bong free rein on “Okja” and took away the cinema in return. On “Snowpiercer”, he had to fight for his cut.

The local is not an obstacle. For Bong, it is the precondition.

Success has to be accompanied. Rights sold early, a distributor who believes in the film, and a team on the road for months. “Parasite” had all of it.

Why Korean stories resonate so widely is the subject of Why Korean Stories Captivate the World.