Bong Joon-ho´s darkly comic Korean thriller has become a box office hit, a meme machine and might be the first non-English language film to win the best picture OscarOn Monday morning, a flurry of Hollywood trade-paper headlines greeted the news that Bong Joon-ho´s Parasite had, in its fifth weekend of release, crossed the $10m threshold: at this time of writing, its American gross stands at $11.3m, steadily rising as its screen count expands across the country. Ordinarily, that is hardly a figure that would have champagne corks popping in Tinseltown, but the current market is a tough one for subtitled cinema: Parasite´s current haul is the year´s highest for any non-English-language film in the US. (For the sake of comparison, last year´s critically beloved, Cannes-approved Korean thriller, Lee Chang-dong´s Burning, made a paltry $719,000 stateside; even Park Chan-wook´s more broadly accessible The Handmaiden barely scraped $2m in 2016.) Related: Parasite: how Bong Joon-ho returned home to make his masterpiece Continue reading...
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