Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi film Mickey 17 is suddenly back in the conversation. It’s started trending on HBO Max in the U.S. and has landed in Netflix top 10 lists in some international markets, based on the platforms’ own rankings, giving it a fresh wave of attention after a theatrical run that fell short.
It was Bong’s first feature since Parasite, and it wasn’t cheap. Reports put the budget at about $118 million, while worldwide box office came in around $133.3 million. That’s well below the roughly $236 million to $295 million that industry estimates usually say a movie at that scale needs to reach. Still, streaming has people looking at it again, and critics and fans are starting to treat it as one of the year’s messier, louder, more ambitious studio swings.
The film adapts Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7. It follows Mickey, an “expendable” worker on a space-colonization mission who’s expected to die whenever the job requires it, then come back in a newly printed body with most of his memories still there. Robert Pattinson plays both Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, and a lot of the praise around the movie has gone to the way he handles the mix of dark comedy, panic, and existential dread.
Its trouble in theaters probably came from a few things hitting at once: marketing that was hard to pin down, release-date changes, and a genuinely strange blend of grotesque sci-fi, political satire, and ideas about identity, labor, corporate power, colonialism, and class. Those themes will feel familiar if you’ve seen Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer, Okja, and Parasite.
If you skipped Mickey 17 in theaters, this second life on streaming looks like a good reason to give it a shot. It’s on HBO Max in the U.S. and on Netflix in some international markets.
