Mickey 17 doesn’t hit theaters until January 31, but Warner Bros wanted exhibitors to know that they had the goods.
The pic’s Oscar-winning Parasite filmmaker Bong Joon Ho was in the house at Caesars Colosseum, and it was his first time at the exhibitor-studio confab.
“It’s based on the novel Mickey 7, but we made it Mickey 17, Bong said. “The number is the number of times he dies. I kill him 10 times more. It’s a story of a simple man. It’s a sci-fi movie. It’s hard to say sci-fi — it’s a human story.”
The first look got rousing applause and was rather comical, set to the Dean Martin tune “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?” Pattinson’s character is an expendable, and his job is to die several times through various experiments on a ship deep in space. We literally see him floating in an astronaut suit — dead. At one point, Pattinson encounters a twin of himself, who also tries to kill him.
“He has a crazy thing in his eyes,” Bong said about why he chose The Batman actor.
Pattinson, who joined the director and Warner Bros co-bosses Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, said the twins were “very fun characters. Mickey 17 has the lowest expectations of his life, and the world keeps pushing him. … 18 comes along and he has frontal lobe damage, and libido damage. He has no idea how 17 has been surviving. It’s like playing a brother out of control.”
Bong said Beef Emmy winner Steven Yuen “plays another crazy guy in the movie,” while Naomi Ackie is one of the Mickey GFs.