Mickey 17

Mickey 17 is a 2025 science fiction black comedy film written, produced, and directed by Bong Joon Ho, based on the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. The film stars Robert Pattinson in the title role, alongside Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. Set in the year 2054, the plot follows a man who joins a space colony as an "Expendable", a disposable worker who gets cloned every time he dies for research purposes.
Mickey 17 had its world premiere at the Leicester Square in London, United Kingdom, on February 13, 2025, and was theatrically released by Warner Bros. Pictures in South Korea on February 28, 2025, and in the United States on March 7. The film received generally positive reviews from critics but was a box office disappointment, grossing $122 million worldwide.
In the year 2050, Mickey Barnes and his friend Timo join a spaceship crew heading to colonize the ice-planet Niflheim, in order to escape a murderous loan shark. Timo becomes a shuttle pilot, while Mickey signs up as an "Expendable", an illegal process where he takes on lethal tasks and a new clone of him with restored memories is created after each death. During the voyage, a romance develops between Mickey and security agent Nasha.
Four years later, the spaceship arrives at snowy Niflheim. Using multiple iterations of Mickey, the ships scientists develop a vaccine for the planet's pathogens. The seventeenth Mickey is sent to capture a native lifeform dubbed "Creepers," but falls into a fissure, where Timo, believing him dead, reports it and leaves with Mickey's flamethrower, and the crew creates the Mickey 18 clone. However, the Creepers rescue Mickey 17, pushing him out of the fissure.
Mickey 17 returns to the ship, where he meets Mickey 18, a more aggressive clone. The expedition's leader, Kenneth Marshall, has sworn that in the event of "Multiples" of clones, all clones will be eliminated. As such, Mickey 18 attempts to kill Mickey 17, but Mickey 17 suggests they secretly rotate duties and deaths to survive. The two are interrupted when they witness Timo selling drugs made from flamethrower fuel. Blaming him for the situation that caused them to leave Earth in the first place, Mickey 18 tries to kill Timo, but relents when they are interrupted by Nasha. Mickey 18 leaves with Nasha, while Mickey 17 is taken to dinner with Marshall, his wife Ylfa, and security agent Kai. At the dinner Mickey 17 reacts severely to being fed experimental meat and painkillers. Kai rescues Mickey 17 from being executed and brings him to her quarters, but Mickey 17 flees back to Nasha when Kai attempts to seduce him.
Nasha learns of the clones and accepts them, but when Kai tries to report them, she stops her. When Mickey 17 informs Mickey 18 of the dinner incident, an enraged Mickey 18 decides to kill Marshall at a public ceremony commemorating a piece of Niflheim rock. Two baby Creepers, Luko and Zoco, emerge from a Niflheim rock. Mickey 17 captures Zoco, but Luko is killed by security when it attempts to jump on Marshall. Nasha stops Mickey 18 from killing Marshall, but with the Multiples exposed, Mickey 17, 18, and Nasha are arrested. Meanwhile, thousands of Creepers gather outside the ship, calling for Zoco. In the brig, Mickey 17's description of the Creepers helping him makes Nasha realize they are sentient. Timo arrives and tries to kill Mickey 17, revealing that the loan shark has an agent onboard who will kill him if he doesn't record himself dismembering Mickey. Nasha and Mickey 18 overpower him, but security intervenes and takes them all to Marshall.
Marshall wants to eliminate the Creepers, and destroys Mickey's memory backups to prevent his re-cloning. Marshall's assistant, Preston, convinces Marshall to make the Mickeys go outside and compete to collect Creeper tails, with the winner allowed to live. The Mickeys are fitted with remote-detonated bomb vests to ensure compliance.
Once outside, the Mickeys seek out the Creepers' leader. Marshall follows with a security team to eliminate them. Mickey 17 uses a translation device to warn the Creeper leader about Marshall's plan, and the leader demands Zoco's release and the sacrifice of a human in return for Luko's death. Mickey 17 urges Nasha to free Zoco. She takes Ylfa hostage to ensure Zoco's release, and security agents, secretly working against Marshall, arrest Ylfa. Mickey 18 detonates his vest, killing himself and Marshall to meet the Creepers' demands.
Afterward, Preston and Marshall's collaborators face justice, and Ylfa is arrested before killing herself. The loan shark associate attacks Timo, but Timo kills him in self defense and uses the incident to testify against the loan sharks. Nasha becomes the colony's political leader and, during a groundbreaking ceremony, Mickey 17, now just called "Mickey Barnes", destroys the cloning device, ending the Expendable program.
A film adaptation of Edward Ashton's novel Mickey7 was announced to be in development prior to its publication in January 2022, with Bong Joon Ho writing, directing, and producing for Warner Bros. Pictures and Robert Pattinson in talks to star. Charles Yu wrote additional literary material for the film. Bong was intrigued by the concepts presented in the book, though he made many changes to the characters, including modifying Mickey's personality to be a little more simple minded. He wrote the screenplay in 2021 based on an early draft of the book, and said that none of the characters portrayed were meant to be mirroring active politicians. Robert Pattinson was the first actor to come to mind for a performance that required dual roles, and he agreed immediately to take the role after being offered it. Pattinson improvised many lines as Mickey 18, who starts with an aggressive personality, then grows as a person who wants to protect 17.
Bong storyboarded each sequence before filming. Pattinson helped to revise part of the script to give what Bong described as "humor and knowledge of slang that I would have never come across otherwise." Pattinson also partially based his performance on Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber, citing similar comedic injuries. Bong maintained that he had final cut privilege, though there was a delay in the editing. To differentiate the two main Mickeys, Pattinson changed his accent for each character, comparing them to Ren and Stimpy from the show of the same name. In the initial script reading, he imitated the voices of Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O from Jackass. Bong told him not to do the Steve-O impression.
Pattinson was confirmed to star in May 2022, with Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo joining the cast. In July, Steven Yeun was added to the cast. Tim Key was cast after a phone call, as Bong wanted him specifically for a role. Production began at Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden on August 2, 2022, and concluded in December 2022. Filming was finished in January 2023, with the director working on the ideal cut after.
The film's creepers were designed by Bong and Jang Hee-chul, who has been collaborating with Bong to create monsters for his movies since The Host (2006).
The VFX was done by Framestore, DNEG, Rising Sun Pictures, and Turncoat pictures. DNEG handled all the sequences shot on the ice planet of Niflheim, and created the creepers.
Mickey 17 premiered at the Leicester Square in London, United Kingdom, on February 13, 2025. The film was screened at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival on February 15, 2025, before opening in South Korea on February 28, 2025, a week before its global rollout.
The film was theatrically released in the United States on March 7, 2025, by Warner Bros. Pictures. It was originally scheduled to be released on March 29, 2024, but was taken off the schedule due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. It was rescheduled for January 31, 2025 (where it would have opened three days earlier in South Korea) but was pushed back to April 18, 2025, to take advantage of Easter weekend and avoid competition with Dog Man, and finally to March 7, 2025, swapping the latter date with Sinners.
Mickey 17 will be released on Digital HD on April 8, 2025.
As of April 4, 2025, Mickey 17 has grossed $44.7 million in the United States and Canada, and $77.7 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $122.4 million. With a combined $198 million spent on production and marketing, it was estimated the film needed to gross $240–300 million worldwide in order to break-even. Variety later reported the film would lose Warner Bros. $75–80 million during its theatrical run.
In South Korea, the film opened on February 28, 2025, and scored the highest post-pandemic debut by Warner Bros., grossing $1.7 million and surpassing the record previously set by Pattinson's 2022 film, The Batman. It went on to debut to $9 million in its opening weekend.
In the United States and Canada, Mickey 17 was projected to gross $18–20 million from 3,770 theaters in its opening weekend. It made $7.7 million on its first day, including an estimated $2.5 million from Thursday previews. It went on to debut to $19 million, which Deadline Hollywood described as in-line with original sci-fi films, including Jupiter Ascending ($18.3 million opening in 2015), Ad Astra ($19 million in 2019), and The Creator ($14 million in 2023). Because of the film's budget, the publication also projected that the film would not be immediately profitable for Warner Bros. In its second weekend, the film grossed $7.4 million (dropping 61%), finishing third behind newcomers Novocaine and Black Bag. It then made $3.7 million in its third weekend, finishing in fifth.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 78% of 311 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.1/10. The website's consensus reads: "Mickey 17 finds Bong Joon Ho returning to his forte of daffy sci-fi with a withering social critique at its core, proving along the way that you can never have too many Robert Pattinsons." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 72 out of 100, based on 60 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale, while those surveyed by PostTrak gave it 4 out of 5 stars, with 63% saying they would definitely recommend the film.
Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph awarded the film 4 stars out of 5, noting: "As in much of Bong's work, its chop-and-change attitude to genre keeps his audience on their toes. The film veers from slapstick to absurdism to horror and back again, often within a single shot, such as the regular sight of the latest Pattinson clone flopping out of the meat printer with a sausagey flumph." Jacob Oller of The A.V. Club called the film "An unwieldy, long-winded, wildly entertaining sci-fi critique of our dehumanizing present." In his review for NPR, critic Justin Chang wrote that the film's satire "wears awfully thin", but that "Bong is one of the few filmmakers who can work at this scale, with elaborate production design and intricate visual effects, and still retain his artistic signature."
A less enthusiastic review came from Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair, who deemed the film a "disappointing follow-up to Parasite", while stating: "Perhaps if Bong had focused on the clone idea, more intricately exploring the corporate world's annihilating treatment of workers, he could have arrived at something rattling, even profound. Alas, he is ultimately too enamored of his wiggly animal creations, and by the broadest of jokes about TV camera-obsessed petty tyrants. In all its diminished attention span, Mickey 17 plays less like a new declaration from a great master and more like a feverish TikTok 'doom scroll' leading nowhere."
Jocelyn Noveck of the Associated Press gave the movie 2 stars out of 4, saying that although having Pattinson's character repeatedly die is an interesting plot-device, and the highlight of the film, that "much of this film devolves into narrative chaos, bloat and excess."
Kenneth Marshall, the spaceship captain and politician played by Mark Ruffalo, has been interpreted by some critics as a caricature of authoritarian leaders. For instance, Polygon describes Marshall as "a distinctly Trump-like figure whose dangerous associations with religious zealotry and white nationalism are mere avenues to earn political credibility among his base." Director Bong Joon Ho clarified that Marshall's character is not based on any specific individual but is "a mix of many different politicians" and "dictators that we have seen throughout history."