One of the more concerning trends I’ve seen in the last 10 or so years is that of a young and talented up and coming indie filmmaker selling his or herself out to the big studios.
It doesn’t help that any filmmaker that shows any hint of promise quickly gets sucked into the Marvel/Disney/Sequel vacuum. The likes of Barry Jenkins, Chloe Zhao, Ryan Coogler, Michael Sarnoski, Destin Daniel Cretton, and many more, have all recently sold their creative souls for corporate product.
The list has been growing these last few years. We can now add “Minari” helmer Lee Isaac Chung to that list. He’s close to signing on to direct a sequel to the 1996 action movie “Twister.”
“Minari” was one of the most critically-acclaimed movies of 2020. It won the top prize at Sundance and garnered six Oscar nominations including Best Picture. Its simple realism struck a chord with many people.
If he were the promising auteur that many critics claimed he was, then Chung wouldn’t have been the path chosen. One must ask, would Jonathan Glazer, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, Joel Coen, Wes Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino ever sign on to direct “Mufasa: The Lion King”? “Twister 2”? “Eternals”? Of course not.
These are tough times right now in the industry, even for critically-acclaimed newbie filmmakers, and if you truly want to make the big bucks then, much like Chung just did, you need to sell your soul to the devil.
Going forward it's going to become more and more of the norm for a promising young filmmaker to get sucked into the IP machine before they can put together more than two personal projects.
Of course, we all know the rule: take these reactions with a grain of salt rather than treating them as gospel. Still, I will say that the film tested like gangbusters earlier this year, and Lionsgate clearly has confidence.