Yorgos Lanthimos is a restless filmmaker. After his coming-of-age Victorian sci-fi Poor Things helped Emma Stone earn an Oscar, he moved on to a triptych of shorts, Kinds of Kindness, which also features Stone. Now, while Lanthimos shows off Kinds of Kindness at the Cannes Film Festival, his next project has landed a distributor (and, yes, Emma Stone is in it too).
According to Variety, Lanthimos’ next movie, Bugonia, will be released by Focus Features, a departure after Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness were distributed by Searchlight. It’s also written by Will Tracy, a Succession alum and showrunner of the recent HBO series The Regime, instead of Lanthimos’ usual collaborators, Tony McNamara and Efthimis Fillipou.
But while the distributor and writer are different, the sci-fi genre is very familiar. Bugonia follows “two conspiracy obsessed young men who kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.”An adaptation of the 2003 South Korean comedy Save The Green Planet!, the remake will star Stone and Jesse Plemons, who also appeared in Kinds of Kindness.
Save the Green Planet! gets... silly.
Bugonia has been in development for a while. Ari Aster’s Square Peg Productions and Korean production company CJ Entertainment — which produced Save The Green Planet! and recent hits like Parasite — announced the remake was in development back in 2020.
So it looks like Lanthimos will frequently return to sci-fi in the years ahead, even if he branches out now and then. Mystic, otherworldly elements like those present in The Lobster and Poor Things work well with Lanthimos’ style, but with his varied taste — he’s currently attached to the adaptation of Otessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation — it’s unlikely he’ll be content to work in just one genre.
But Bugonia proves Poor Things won’t be the Lanthimos sci-fi project we’ll see soon. He’s turning his lens to aliens now, and he has horror phenom Ari Aster in his corner. If you thought Poor Things was weird, you haven’t seen anything yet.
