I'll never forget watching Bong Joon-ho's monumental 2019 film, Parasite and relating to my colleagues sentiment that she "wished she'd never watched it so she could experience it for the first time again." Now, after COVID-19 has swept the world and we haven't heard much from the prolific director since, Joon-ho was recently on an episode of The Director’s Cut podcast, where he said, “It feels like I’m splitting my brain in half left and right writing these two scripts. But I finished one last week.” (!!)

Which, as you might guess, means we will be getting two new films by the Oscar-winning director in the not-so-distant future. Very little about each plot has been revealed thus far, except that “the Korean film is located in Seoul and has unique elements of horror and action,” He said. “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 UK and half in the US”. With so much left to the imagination, we can only attempt to speculate on what this true event might be, which we will happily pass the time doing.

To add to the sheer delight of this news, Joon-ho is in the process of developing a Parasite HBO series with Adam McKay, the mastermind behind Succession, The Big Short and Vice. There is no specific plot details, but the series will reportedly be based on some discarded ideas from the original Parasite script. Chaotic! While we likely won't get new Joon-ho magic for at least another whole year, we'll be keeping a keen eye out for any updates on these projects in the meantime.

Image: @bong_joon_ho