Bong Joon-ho Confirms That He's Got One of Two New Screenplays Already Finished

Whenever a successful artist manages to make a splash at a prestigious awards ceremony like the Academy Awards, everyone and their mother wants to know what their next project is going to be. I could remember how crazed everyone was for The Master after There Will Be Blood; following No Country for Old Men, people were obsessed with knowing what the Coen Brothers' follow-up flick would be. And the same goes for Bong Joon-ho after his Best Picture win for Parasite.

If you aren't familiar with the South Korean film director, then there are probably a lot of cinephiles who will gladly spend hours and hours of their time explaining why you have absolutely zero taste in modern film and how you need to acquaint yourself with the director's body of work.

The first American audiences got a taste of Joon-ho was around 2006 when The Host had a theatrical release in the U.S.

Usually foreign language films don't get that much buzz stateside, and the flick surprised a lot of viewers by being a monster movie that wasn't pretending to be profound. It was humorous, had genuine jump scares, impressive CGI for the time, and each and every character was a superb actor with a life all of their own. You could feel that in the flick. It was a legitimately great, layered movie with a popcorn flick premise.

Joon-ho then completely shifted gears with his next movie and decided to direct Mother, a project about a mom who's trying to find a killer that framed her mentally challenged son for the grisly murder of a young girl. He changed it up yet again with the adored Snowpiercer starring Chris Evans, which has been turned into a spin-off series stateside.

Then came Netflix's Okja, which is ridiculously good and manages to carry a huge anti-factory farming message without coming off as preachy propaganda. The large-scale feel of both Snowpiercer and Okja again was a stark juxtaposition from Parasite, which eventually went on to win Best Picture.

Basically, Bong Joon-ho's been making a ton of great flicks and he's shown there's no shortage of inventive new ideas he can take. So what will his next film be?

The Director reveals that he has two screenplay ideas for the next flicks he's going to pursue, and one of these scripts is already done. What it's going to be about, however, is anyone's guess at this point. Collider reports that during a discussion with Knives Out director Rian Johnson, Joon-ho has stated he spent the greater part of 2020 kicking around two separate screenplays.

"It feels like I’m splitting my brain in half left and right writing these two scripts. But I finished one last week," he said on The Director's Cut podcast.

In 2019, he told Variety that one of the projects is based in Seoul, Korea, whereas the other film is bifurcated between the US and the UK and is based on a true event.

As for the scope of the movies, don't expect any huge, blockbuster-esque films.

"One is a Korean-language one, and the other one is an English-language one. Both projects are not big films. They’re the size of Parasite or Mother," he told the outlet."

He added, "The Korean film is located in Seoul and has unique elements of horror and action. It’s difficult to define the genre of my films. The English project is a drama film based on a true event that happened in 2016. Of course I won’t know until I finish the script, but it has to be set half in the U.K. and half in the U.S."

Parasite came out about a year after filming began: principal filming started on May 18, 2018 and was completed on Sept. 19, 2018, which is 124 days total.

If these two flicks are about the same size and scope as Parasite, then we can expect the movie to come out around a year after production begins on them.

That being said, anything can happen time-wise now because of COVID-19, but the fact that the films aren't enormous in scale might make things a bit easier for Joon-ho to get work done. Are you looking forward to his next flicks? Or are you like this dude and are pissed off that Joker didn't win best picture?