Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘Bugonia’: How ‘Parasite’ and ‘Squid Game’ Success Led the Auteur to Remake Korean Sci-Fi ‘Save the Green Planet’

Fresh from their Cannes success with “Kinds of Kindness,” iconic director Yorgos Lanthimos and his totemic star Emma Stone are now busily filming “Bugonia,’ a sci-fi conspiracy movie that is a remake of South Korean film “Save the Green Planet.”

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The film 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. The adapted script is from “Succession” and “The Menu” writer Will Tracy.

While the new film’s co-producer and co-financier Korean conglomerate CJ ENM long ago put in place an IP strategy that involves the development of local and international remakes, the company believes it unlikely that a new “Save the Green Planet” would have taken off without the global expansion of “Hallyu,” or the Korean wave.

The original “Save the Green Planet,” with its elements of comedy and sadistic torture, was directed by Jang Joon-hwan and released in 2003. It stirred sharply mixed critical reactions and passed largely unnoticed at the box office but has retained cult status among Korean film aficionados.

“[It] works on a variety of levels, from gruesome slapstick comedy through social critique to genuinely chilling Grand Guignol,” said Variety ’s review at the time , before critiquing an off-kilter final act.

“’Save the Green Planet’ was ahead of its time and simply came out too early,” says Jerry Ko, CJ ENM’s head of international film department.

“Back in 2003, the world was just beginning to get to know Korean cinema, people like Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook and a few others. Audiences began to form an idea of what a Korean film might look like. And this film was not like that at all,” he adds. “Kim was at the core of the art-house movement and traveled to festivals. Park and others had greater appeal for general [Korean] audiences. But ‘Save the Green Planet’ was a bit unique and fell between commercial and art house registers. Nowadays, I think this kind of film can connect with global audiences. And so, we decided to give it another try in the late 2010s, when ‘Parasite’ and ‘Squid Game’ were becoming successful.”

“Parasite,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019 and four Oscars in early 2020, was part-financed and released internationally by the Korean major. While CJ has no connection to Netflix’s gruesome but addictive, “Squid Game,” Ko says that series also benefited from growing overseas understanding of Korean content.

“Like us, the director of ‘Squid Game’ had been working on his project, initially as a feature film, since around 2010. But 10 years later, he found a way to get that project made [as a series],” Ko says.

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CJ ENM, which has ridden the Korean wave to become majority owner of Fifth Season — the company that was previously the scripted content division of Endeavor — has made multiple stabs at penetrating Hollywood, which it regarded as having better access to finance and global distribution. These efforts include an equity stake in Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s infant Dreamworks SKG, a multi-year pact with Chris Columbus’s 1492 Productions and a $40 million investment in TNT’s “Snowpiercer” series, which was adapted from a CJ Entertainment co-produced film by Bong Joon-ho. (It can’t hurt that the group’s visionary vice chair Miky Lee is California-based and that CJ operates a handful of U.S. multiplexes modeled on its upscale CJ-CGV chain in Korea.)

In 2017, CJ ENM said that IP and co-development would be how it would penetrate Hollywood , as it had already done in Asia. The blueprint for CJ’s production outreach was its “Miss Granny” franchise. The comedy-drama has been remade several times within Asia (including China, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam), each time with subtle cultural tweaks. It explored two separate remakes of the film in North America, aimed at different audience segments. Tyler Perry Studios was handling an English-language version of the film, targeting the African American community, while 3Pas Studio was to make a Spanish-language version for the Hispanic market and potentially for Latin America.

Latterly, CJ ENM America has stepped up its own stateside development activity with the hiring of Elsie Choi, a film and TV development veteran who has worked for such producers as Dan Lin and Bruce Willis.

But sometimes progress comes down to good fortune. “ When we started to think about the remake of ‘Save the Green Planet’ with the original director Jang envisaged as director again, we were struggling with how to modernize it, how to make it meaningful. Then we were put in touch with Ari Aster [writer and director of ‘Midsommar’] who was curating something at LACMA and introducing this film,” Ko says.

Aster was invited to come on board and was crucially involved in both the hiring of Tracy and the decision to change the gender of the central character from male to female. “We discussed this point with Jang and Aster and, given today’s zeitgeist, decided to change the sex of the character,” Ko says. “That was done before Yorgos Lanthimos was attached. And by the time he did, we then we had an almost final script.”

Lanthimos — who brought regular producing partner, Element Pictures, and later financing from Fremantle, Element’s parent company — was locked in before “Poor Things” dominated at Venice last year and claimed four Oscars. Ko says the company was lucky again, and that Lanthimos’ quote has since increased.

But there is nothing lucky about the depth of CJ ENM’s IP reserves or its determination to explore different routes to globalization. It has at least three other English-language remakes in different stages of readiness in Hollywood: “Extreme Job” and “Bye Bye Bye” (a remake of 2011 deathbed melodrama “Sunny”) are both set up at Universal, and Michael Mann is working on a remake of CJ ENM’s 2015 crime action hit “Veteran ” after he’s finished with “Heat 2.”

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