Box Office: Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 crosses USD 100M globally, set to lose up to USD 75-80M regardless

Despite crossing USD 100M worldwide, Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 struggles to recover its USD 198M budget, with reports suggesting Warner Bros. could face losses of up to USD 80M.

Written by Seema Sinha , Entertainment Journalist

Published on Mar 24, 2025 | 01:01 PM IST | 15.9K

Picture Courtesy: Warner Bros. Pictures

Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi effort Mickey 17 shows no signs of a turnaround at the box office, grossing USD 12 million worldwide this weekend. The Robert Pattinson starrer has a USD 40.2 million domestic haul and USD 96.8 million from international markets after three weekends in theaters. Though the figures push its total past USD 100 million, they are nowhere near enough to justify its USD 118 million production budget, not even including marketing costs.

For those unversed, the film, also starring Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo, is set in the year 2054. The plot revolves around a man (Pattinson) who joins a space mission as an Expendable—a disposable worker who gets cloned every time he dies for research purposes. Things, however, go south when a previous version of him refuses to disappear, introducing themes of existential crisis in the film.

Based on Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, the film premiered at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival on February 15 and was theatrically released by Warner Bros. in South Korea on February 28. In Bong’s home market, the film has done and continues to do favorable business, seemingly due to the filmmaker’s reputation as an Academy Award winner. His 2019 tragicomedy Parasite swept the 2020 Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature. Notably, Mickey 17 was Bong’s first big-screen outing since then, and as can be said, it failed to recreate the magic.

With a combined USD 198 million spent on making and marketing, Mickey 17 needed to gross USD 240–300 million worldwide to break even. Variety recently reported that the film would lose Warner Bros. USD 75 to USD 80 million during its theatrical run.

The studio will look to recoup its losses via A Minecraft Movie, arriving April 4. Starring Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Emma Myers, and Jennifer Coolidge, the title is projected to log an opening weekend of USD 55 to USD 75 million and collect around the same amount internationally in its first three days. It will, however, face competition from Disney’s Snow White, which arrived on March 21. We’ll have to wait and see how strong the Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot starrer holds two weeks after its debut. So far, it has underperformed at the box office, registering a global opening of USD 87.3 million—well below the USD 100 million opening weekend estimate.