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 Oscar
On 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