Does Mickey 17 Deserve to Be the First Box-Office Bomb of 2025?
There’s no questioning the budget, the pedigree or the stars for Warner Bros. latest… but audiences aren’t coming. What’s going on?
good.film
2 months ago
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It’s been nearly 3 years in the waiting. Based on one of the very best sci-fi books of 2022 (“multilayered and wildly entertaining”, said the critics). Backed by a big studio (Warner Bros.) to promote the hell out of it, with a big studio budget to match. Total spend? $198 million. It’s Bong Joon-ho’s first film after Parasite, his surprise best picture-winning smash. It stars three Oscar nominees. And it’s led by not just one, but TWO Robert Pattinsons, aka the guy who breathed new life into The Batman… to the tune of $772 million.
Yep, you could say anticipation for Mickey 17 was higher than Woody Harrelson at Coachella. And yet just 10 days after release, the film is struggling to justify that outlay. It opened to a US$19 million weekend – and was instantly labeled a huge disappointment. In its 2nd weekend, the numbers were worse, with takings dropping by over 60% (in what was also the lowest-grossing weekend of the year so far for cinemas overall). The Hollywood Reporter is referring to the film as “Warner Bros.’ ill-fated Mickey 17”.
But is that really fair? The studio’s sky-high spend essentially doomed the film; with $200mil on the line, it HAD to be a blockbuster to be considered a success. With a great story and great talent both in front and behind the camera, is it Mickey 17’s fault that it’s failing that test? To compound the pain, Warner Bros. just announced the film’s digital release date: it’ll be available to stream a mere EIGHTEEN DAYS after hitting theatres. That’s music to the ears of the “meh, I’ll wait for streaming” crowd – but it creates a vicious downward spiral for theaters.
But TBH, we really don’t want to write an article about cinema’s digital death knell. Bong Joon-ho is a brilliant director, and he’s delivered a meaty “What if…?” story with fascinating resonances to our society today. Even if Mickey 17 doesn’t hit the “masterpiece” status of say, Parasite, it’s still worthy of being seen in its most immersive form: on a big screen, in the dark, with a group of strangers (our happy place!). So here’s three reasons to go see Mickey 17 in cinemas – where it SHOULD be seen – while you still can.
Reason 1: It’s a moving story of self worth.
It makes sense to feel a little low about yourself when you’re just a human printout on a frosty foreign planet. We meet Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) at the bottom of an ice cave, where even he’s surprised to be alive – I should’ve snapped in half on the way down instead of turning into a meat popsicle! It’s not the first time he refers to himself as meat. He’s sure he’s about to be devoured when the planet’s indigenous hoggy-tardigrade hybrids come sniffing. Even on my 17th go round, I really hate dying, Mickey narrates for us.
The weird quadrupeds leave him to survive another day, and Bong Joon-ho feeds us the context. He’s literally Mickey Number 17: sixteen other Mickeys have met their fate on Planet Niflheim, either working to colonize this hostile planet, or as human guinea pigs (the best fun of the whole film might be the montage of grisly Mickey un-alivings). But unlike say, Moon, where Sam Rockwell’s spacebound character had no idea he was a clone, Mickey willingly signed up for this job no-one else wants.
Mickey calls his repeating sacrifice “My great gift to mankind”, but this isn’t a true sacrifice. It’s one born of his lack of self-esteem. Mickey blames himself for his Mum’s death; he seems to almost welcome the pain and degrading experiences as rightful punishment. Here’s where Bong uses the trappings of sci-fi to make this idea way more interesting: Mickey might be a clone, but his “original” memories always copy over. What’s different is how he chooses to remember them. That’s why it’s so fascinating when Mickey 17 is mistakenly assumed to have died in the fall, and Mickey 18 (Robert Pattinson, again, with a tweaked vibe) is printed afresh.
Suddenly, Bong Joon-ho has two “identical”, but not quite the same, Mickeys to play off against each other. And yes, there’s some cute body-double hijinks here – like when Mickey's girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) ecstatically embraces the fantasy of a threesome that involves two versions of the man she loves. But surprisingly, Mickey 17 soon becomes an examination of how our histories can bog us down if we choose to let them define us; Mickey 18 is somehow more freewheeling and confident than Mickey 17, and intriguingly, he doesn’t carry any guilt over his Mum’s death.
We get a glimpse of the real trauma that Mickey 17 is carrying when he suggests to Mickey 18 “Our entire lives have been punishment”. Bong Joon-ho gives us the sense that Mickey 17 even chose to become an “expendable” in the first place as some kind of penance for causing the car crash that killed his Mum. But although he’s a carbon-copy with the same history as his doppelganger, Mickey 18 seems to have made a conscious choice that he was never to blame. That’s set him up to have an entirely different set of behaviours and braggadocio – which ties directly into his actions at the film’s climax.
Reason 2: It’s a peak satire about class struggle.
Class disparity is Bong Joon-ho’s bread and butter; it’s been a core theme of his work from 2009’s Mother through to Snowpiercer in 2013 and of course, Parasite, which became the first foreign language film ever to claim the Academy Award for Best Picture just before Covid hit in 2020 (ah, simpler times). Mickey 17 is smack bang in the same territory, and while it’s clearly broader both in tone and target, it might be even harder hitting in its satirisation of corporate greed and those who drive it.
Leading the colonization effort here is Hieronymous Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), who’s 50% politician, 50% CEO, and 100% fake tan and hyper-white veneers. He’s not quite Trump or Musk, but he’s not NOT Trump or Musk. He’s ably supported by his very groomed wife and clinger-on Gwen (Toni Collette) who loves a pantsuit and has an amusing fixation on sauces. They’re polar opposites from the smudged masses in the spaceship’s mess hall, and Marshall doesn’t hide his disgust when he stands before them to announce like a dictator that rations are tight, and sexual intercourse uses 100 calories, so he’s banning it until they reach Niflheim’s surface.
“My primary goal is to always entertain the audience because that in itself is such an effort. With the other social-political layers of the story, I want them to be absorbed in what they're seeing in theatres and then afterwards kind of wonder, “Oh maybe that's what that meant, maybe that's actually quite similar to my own situation.” You know, like a small afterthought.”
~ Bong Joon-ho
So why sign up? Aside from escaping the grief we mentioned, Mickey gives it to us straight. I don’t have any money. I don’t have any family. I don’t really have any skills whatsoever. He has nothing to lose, and he’s not alone: there’s countless others in the migration queue to an ice planet that’s barely habitable. We can only guess what’s happened to Earth to prompt the exodus – environmental disaster? Economic collapse? Another Sex and the City reboot?
For Marshall, the caste system is very real. Mickey 17 (and every employee like him) are simply tools – expendable, recyclable humans. To dehumanise is always a capitalist’s goal, so Marshall hits the jackpot with employees whose souls are literally stored on hard drives. But Bong’s point is that this is only possible in a system that accepts an entire class of people as being expendable. Characters like Nasha and Mickey 18 push back against that acceptance (Nasha even falls in love with one). It’s a reminder that the most revolutionary thing we can do is to simply see one another as human and stand up for each other.
Interestingly, Marshall has a very different value system for the female workers, who can be used to repopulate Niflheim when they’re settled in. Bong has good fun with this slimy dynamic; when Marshall looks Nasha up and down, growling You really are a perfect candidate for an elite genetic program, aren’t you? she spits back, Am I just a uterus to you?!
Mickey 17 has the same grimy, lived-in space aesthetic as other off-world classics (think Alien) and, like a visual shortcut that jogs our understanding, the economic landscape of this future reality is immediately clear. If an exploration company could print workers over and over, and it doesn’t matter if they die, OF COURSE they would. This idea could be the next gross iteration of Amazon’s delivery drivers or Apple’s iPhone assembly workers. In other words, take the slim rights that those employees have today, and strip them completely away.
Reason 3: It’s a bizarro-Avatar that looks and sounds amazing.
Aside from the A-list cast, there’s an easy answer for where all that budget probably went: the film’s sets, production design, soundscape and cinematography are all fantastic. It bears repeating – see it on the big screen! And while Mickey 17 doesn’t scream “I’m a CGI movie” like say, Avatar clearly does, there’s obviously visual effects at play to create the other major characters of the film: those oddly endearing space piglets, aka the original residents of planet Niflheim.
Bong Joon-ho is on familiar ground here too: his Netflix film Okja explored ideas of animal rights, with its story of a young girl’s quest to rescue her enormous, genetically modified pig from a multicorp not unlike the one that keeps squeezing new Mickeys out of a neon-lit tube. Except this time, instead of one pig, there’s thousands of them. Colloquially, they’re called “creepers”. Marshall finds them abhorrent, of course, and wants to wipe them out. But Nasha realises they’re actually highly intelligent, with complex family relationships and a sense of empathy that, let’s face it, puts plenty of humans we could name to shame.
This all drives Mickey 17 towards an explosive finale, where after realising that the “creepers” don’t want to eat them, or engage in war, Nasha and both Mickeys go rogue. Like Jake Sully in Avatar, they essentially defect from a system of heartless colonisation to protect the ranks of the less powerful who’ve been invaded. Or to put it a little more, er, forcefully, as Nasha ultimately screams at Marshall: Grotesque or not, they are the native inhabitants of this planet! You call them aliens? We’re the aliens, dickhead! They were just living their lives before we came in with our bullshit!
So - what’s the takeaway from Mickey 17?
We’ve probably all felt a bit expendable at some point in our lives. So, putting a pin in the whole ice-planet-with-space-pigs thing, Mickey 17 is a surprisingly relatable portrait of the (often fragile) idea of our right to exist, and our struggle to live a meaningful existence. There’s also the really thought-provoking angle of two “identical” characters taking different stances and actions; essentially, they’re different aspects of the same person. Who would you be if you chose to remember your life differently?
The film’s critique on capitalism and colonisation is pretty stark timing, too. With Elon up to… whatever he’s doing in the White House and Jeff Bezos openly transforming The Washington Post into a corporate mouthpiece, there’s no time like the present for throwing shade at tech oligarchs who exercise massive power that threatens to breach our moral boundaries. Metaphor for disposable labor? Check. Dictators ruling by keeping their workers divided? You bet. But Mickey 17 makes the satisfying point that, despite these depressing realities, collective action from good old well-meaning Earthlings can still lead to systemic change.
Ultimately, Bong’s latest is a complex satire that, while fascinating, doesn’t quite hit every target it aims for. With the pace we’re hurtling down the digital rabbithole, asking what it means to be human is always going to make for queasy viewing – but, isn’t it good to ask?
Despite its faults, Mickey 17 was made for the big screen. And like the film suggests, the human experience (going to the movies) will always beat the soulless facsimile. We’re already staring at screens most of the day, so for the love of Pete, don’t “wait to catch it on streaming.” We can’t treat our movie theatres like expendables.
Keen for that deal to catch Mickey 17 in cinemas?
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