After acquiring the North American rights to the film last year and even sooner after its acclaimed debut at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, NEON has announced that Bong Joon-Ho’s highly-anticipated upcoming fantasy dark comedy Parasite will be hitting theaters on October 11!
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Parasite is a peculiar tale about two families who are worlds apart yet somewhat alike, portraying a striking reality of the world we live in. The film stars Lee Sun-Kyun (A Hard Day), Cho Yeo-Jeong (Obsessed), Choi Woo-Shik (Okja), Park So-Dam (The Priests), and Chang Hyae-Jin (Poetry).
After his 2003 debut Memories of Murder, Bong made a real splash with American audiences with his 2007 monster movie The Host and 2010’s horror-adjacent Mother. More recently, he directed the big-budget sci-fi film Snowpiercer, as well as the family film Okja for Netflix. Parasite marks the filmmaker’s triumphant return to theaters.
In addition to marking a reunion between Joon-Ho and star Song Kang-Ho (Snowpiercer, The Host), the film also marks the fifth collaboration between NEON’s CEO Tom Quinn and the 49-year-old South Korean director, with their work on the sci-fi hit Snowpiercer still proving to be one of the highest-grossing multiplatform titles in history.
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NEON was founded in 2017 by The Alamo Drafthouse’s Tim League and Tom Quinn, formerly of The Weinstein Company’s distribution label Radius. Despite being relatively new, they’ve distributed such films as the subversive kaiju movie Colossal, the dystopic The Bad Batch, the social media commentary Ingrid Goes West, and I, Tonya, about the infamous Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan ice skating debacle.
Parasite recently debuted at the Cannes Film Festival to critical raves, currently maintaining a 97% approval rating from 36 critics on review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes and taking home the Palme d’Or from the festival. It will hit theaters in Los Angeles and New York in typical arthouse fashion beginning October 11.
