Bong Joon-ho

It’s not a Cannes Film Festival without a little bit of controversy. This year, Netflix has the hot potato, as the festival has practically torn itself in twain on the matter of the online streaming platform — to purists, they’re the barbarians at the multiplex gates, but to those in support, they’re deep-pocketed benefactors for such directors as Korea’s Bong Joon Ho. And after his new film Okja got nearly pulled from competition, allowed back in, unofficially rejected by Jury President Pedro Almodovar, and then booed following technical difficulties at the screening, Bong wanted to clear the air around Netflix.

Across the Atlantic, Will Smith and Pedro Almodovar may be jousting over Netflix’s place in the Cannes Film Festival – should a movie produced by the streaming empire be worthy of competing for the French festival’s coveted awards? Or should the Palme D’or only be granted to films with exclusive releases on the big screen? Whatever opinion you hold, Bong Joon-ho’s latest entry, Okja, is set to make its world premiere on the Croisette, and big screen or small, it looks pretty awesome.

Netflix is the future, that much seems beyond debate, but the shape of that future remains very much in flux. The video-streaming giant recently generated some friction with the Cannes Film Festival over the negotiation between theatrical runs and online releasing, a mini-controversy resolved with the edict that Netflix would have to set plans to get their movies into theaters if they want to be included at Cannes moving forward. 2017’s shaping up to be a pivotal year for Netflix, as they prepare to debut more high-profile films than ever and continuously hash out a strategy for best doing that.

Those of you with an interest in the changing face of theatrical exhibition and film festival bylaws (there are dozens of us!) may have caught wind of some recent meshugas unfolding in France. This year’s main Competition slate at the Cannes Film Festival included two films from online-streaming giant Netflix, Bong Joon Ho’s creature feature Okja and Noah Baumbach’s singlehanded resurrection of Adam Sandler The Meyerowitz Stories. But there‘s been some consternation about opening the gates of Cannes to films that may never see release in France outside of the Internet. Is a movie that doesn’t play in a movie theater a movie at all?

With two high-profile films premiering at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Netflix is hard at work proving to filmmakers and financiers alike that it deserves to be taken seriously as both a commercial and artistic distribution platform. And while fans might be excited to watch Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja or Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories from the comfort of their own home, Netflix’s success may have run afoul of French law, putting its relationship with both the film festival and the entire French marketplace in a precarious position.

Good morning! Chances are that you’re just getting up and at ’em now, but a few time zones ahead in sunny France, the film industry has had a busy day. This morning saw the official announcement of the Cannes Film Festival’s class of 2017, with the full Competition and Un Certain Regard slates announced by head honcho Thierry Frémaux in a live press conference in the wee small hours of this morning. As ever, the Competition lineup (the most prestigious program in the world’s most prestigious film festival) boasts a deep roster of cinema’s most respected auteurs, ready to pull back the curtain on some tantalizing-sounding new projects. But let’s not talk around the real news here: Adam Sandler’s going to Cannes, baby.

I come bearing good news for all readers currently struggling to pull themselves out of the weekly Monday-morning existential spiral of perspective — what am I doing here, will this all amount to anything, what’s left, etc. etc. Those questioning the purpose of their labors here on Earth can take some small solace in a new report on Bong Joon-ho’s impending follow-up to Snowpiercer, the left-of-center creature feature titled Okja. In the period of grave self-doubt that begins every work week, it can be helpful to pin your hopes and sense of personal meaning on something greater than yourself. So, without further ado, to those feeling lost in the world and perhaps in need of a new god, I give you: BRACES TILDA.

At the risk of editorializing: Bong Joon-ho rules. The South Korean filmmaker has made a name for himself as a master of off-kilter takes on well-worn genres, most recently transforming the post-apocalyptic action flick into an intricately designed work of Communist agitprop with Snowpiercer. He took on the cop procedural with Memories of Murder, but his most beloved work may be the 2006 creature-feature The Host, in which a shaggy river monster terrorizes the citizens of Seoul. His newest feature will see him returning to the grandly ignoble tradition of movies about supernatural beasties, and with the first trailer having recently surfaced online, we’ve gotten a fleeting look at this lovable freak of nature.

2016 saw one of South Korea’s finest filmmakers resurface with a stone-cold masterpiece, as Oldboy and Stoker director Park Chan-wook demolished audiences at Cannes with his beguiling erotic drama The Handmaiden. In 2017, another one of South Korea’s proudest filmmaking sons will make a grand return, as Bong Joon-ho prepares to unveil his latest feature Okja. A master of blackly humorous genre work (the guy never met a B-movie he couldn’t make into high art), Bong last appeared on American shores in 2014 with Snowpiercer, his first foray into English-language filmmaking. To employ a critical parlance, it ruled, and with the first photos from Okja now trickling out in advance of its debut next year, we have every reason to believe Bong’s latest will rule just as hard.

We’re still not sold on the idea of director Bong Joon-Ho‘’s iconic Snowpiercer joining the ranks of movies remade as TV series, even with Joon-Ho’s involvement, but the train is officially leaving the station. TNT has given out an official pilot order to an adaptation of the 2013 South Korean sci-fi, with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles scribe Josh Friedman at the controls.