In its latest bump all over the Warner Bros release calendar, Bong Joon-ho’s highly-anticipated science fiction movie Mickey 17 (and his first project since the Oscar-winning Parasite) has been pushed to January 31st, 2025. It was previously scheduled for March 29th, 2024.

Robert Pattinson stars in the thriller alongside Toni Collette, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo, and Naomi Ackie. Mickey 17 is based on the 2022 novel by Edward Ashton, described by publisher St. Martin Press as a high-concept cerebral thriller in the vein of The Martian and Dark Matter. 

Ashton’s novel centres on a man known as an Expendable, on a mission to colonize a distant planet. Each colony features one such Expendable who takes on the most dangerous jobs on the mission – jobs that will assuredly lead to their deaths. However, their memories are backed up and they are restored to cloned bodies when they die. In the novel, Mickey 7 – the 7th version of this crewmember – is left for dead on a mission, but survives. When he returns to base, he discovers that Mickey 8, a clone of himself, has already been created – which is a problem because the idea of duplicate Expendables is universally loathed, and if caught, they would likely be thrown into the recycler for protein. In the case of the film adaptation, we can assume that’s Mickey 17 finding Mickey 18 has taken his place.