Fresh off their Cannes success with Kinds of Kindness, legendary director Yorgos Lanthimos and his iconic star Emma Stone are now busy filming Pogonia, a sci-fi conspiracy thriller that is a remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet.
The film revolves around two young conspiracy theorists who kidnap the CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien bent on destroying the Earth. The screenplay is adapted from Will Tracy, who wrote “Succession” and “The List.”
While the new film's co-producer and co-financier, Korean conglomerate CJ ENM, has long had an IP strategy in place that includes developing new domestic and international versions, the company believes the new “Save the Green Planet” film is unlikely to take 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 received sharply mixed critical reviews and was not a box office hit, but it has retained its place among Korean film fans.
“[It] “It works on a variety of levels, from hilariously macabre comedy to social criticism to a truly scary Grand Guignol,” he said. diverseThis was a review of the movie at the time, before criticizing the unbalanced final act.
“‘Save the Green Planet’ was ahead of its time and came out too early,” says Jerry Koo, president of international film at CJ ENM.
“In 2003, the world was just starting to learn about Korean cinema, people like Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook and a few others. Audiences were starting to get an idea of what a Korean film might look like. And this film wasn’t like that at all,” he adds. “Kim was at the heart of the art movement and was traveling to festivals. Park and others had a greater appeal to the general public. [Korean] “Save the Green Planet” was a unique film, falling between commercial films and art cinema films. Nowadays, I think this type of film can attract a global audience. So, we decided to try it again in the late 2000s, when “Parasite” and “Squid Game” were huge hits.”
Save the green planet
CJENM
“Parasite,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019 and four Oscars in early 2020, was partly financed and released internationally by the Korean major. While CJ has no connection to Netflix’s gruesome but addictive film, “Squid Game,” Ko says the series has 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 turn it into a movie. [as a series]”Co says.”
CJ ENM, which rode the Korean wave to become majority owner of Fifth Season — the company that was formerly Endeavor’s scripted content division — has made multiple attempts to break into Hollywood, which it sees as having better access to financing and global distribution. Those efforts include a stake in Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s startup Dreamworks SKG, a multiyear deal with Chris Columbus’s 1492 Productions and a $40 million investment in TNT’s “Snowpiercer” series, which was adapted from a film co-produced by CJ Entertainment’s Bong Joon-ho. (It doesn’t hurt that the group’s visionary vice chairman, Mickey Lee, is based in California and that CJ operates a number of U.S. theaters modeled after the upscale CJ-CGV chain in Korea.)
In 2017, CJ ENM said that IP and co-development would be the means by which it would break into Hollywood, as it had already done in Asia. The original plan to expand CJ Productions was the “Miss Granny” franchise. The comedy-drama was remade several times in Asia (including China, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam), each time with subtle cultural adjustments. Two separate versions of the film were explored in North America, targeting different audiences. Tyler Perry Studios was to handle an English-language version of the film, targeting the African-American community, while 3Pas Studio was to make a Spanish-language version for the Spanish market and possibly Latin America.
Recently, CJ ENM America has ramped up its U.S. development activity by hiring Elsie Choi, a film and television development veteran who has worked with producers such as Dan Lin and Bruce Willis.
But sometimes progress hinges on good fortune. “When we started thinking about remaking Save the Green Planet with the original director that Zhang had envisioned as director again, we were struggling with how to update it, how to make it meaningful. Then we reached out to Ari Aster. [writer and director of ‘Midsommar’] “He was supervising something at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and presenting this film,” says Coe.
Aster was invited to join the cast, and was instrumental in both Tracy's hiring and the decision to change the main character's gender from male to female. “We discussed this with Jang and Aster, and in light of the zeitgeist of the day, we decided to change the character's gender,” says Coe. “This was done before Yorgos Lanthimos was hired. By the time he did, we had almost a finished script.”
Lanthimos, who had a regular production partner, Element Pictures, and later secured financing from Element’s parent company, Fremantle, was signed to the company before “Poor Things” dominated the Venice Film Festival last year and won four Oscars. Coe says the company got lucky again, and Lanthimos’s price tag has since risen.
But there’s nothing lucky about CJ ENM’s deep intellectual property reserves or its determination to explore different paths to globalization. It has at least three other English-language films in various stages of preparation in Hollywood: “Extreme Job” and “Bye Bye Bye” (a remake of the 2011 melodrama “Sunny”) are in the works at Universal, and Michael Mann is working on a remake of CJ ENM’s 2015 crime hit “Veteran” after finishing “Heat 2.”
