In his 11.19.80 review of Michael Cimino‘s Heaven’s Gate, N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canby wrote that the film “fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect.”

I’m not saying that Satan arranged for Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite to win the 2019 Best Picture Oscar, but it does seem as if some kind of some kind of reverse karma invaded BJH during the writing or filming of Mickey 17.

No distributor opens a film by an Oscar-winning director in late January, and if they do it’s close to a guarantee that there’s something very, very wrong.

The word on Mickey 17 hasn’t been good since it was announced on 2.20.24 that Warner Bros. had decided to release it on 1.31.25.

And now some Mickey 17 preview footage has been shown at Cinemacon, and Jeff Sneider smells a tank.

Sneider: “The trailer is set to ‘Ain’t That A Kick In The Head’, and what a kick in the head it is, playing out like a comedic version of Edge of Tomorrow with Pattinson’s Mickey dying over and over in service of some larger mission. Until, I guess, Mickey 18 wakes up to find that Mickey 17 never died…or something…giving us twice the #PattinsonPower.

“Yes, the star of The Batman plays dual roles here, but you won’t be talking about seeing double after this trailer. No, you’ll be talking about Pattinson’s [Joe Pesci-like] voice, which is…a choice. A bad one. How could Bong have allowed Pattinson to do that voice?”

I knew that Bong was part baloney — a sloppy scenarist — after watching that notorious Parasite scene in in which the drunken con artist mom lets the fired maid into the house during a huge rainstorm. That scene injected a kind of virus into BJH’s bloodstream, I believe, and now he’s paying the piper.