Korean auteur Park Chan-wook (“Old Boy”) is moving along at a nice clip. On the way is his HBO period spy series “The Sympathizer,” which comes out later this month, and potentially next is his long-gestating remake of the dark comedy “The Ax.” And while that’s undoubtedly an abundance of great projects in the works, there are even more on the horizon. In a profile with The New Yorker, the filmmaker revealed two other films he’s trying to put together. Those include a revenge Western and a live-action adaptation of the Japanese novel/anime “Genocidal Organ.”
“It’s ultimately in the hands of the financiers,” Chan-wook said of the fate of his two other feature film projects during his conversation with the magazine “Which is to say, I base my decisions about what projects to do next on the reality of the world.”
That untitled Western would be about “bandits who terrorize a small town under the cover of a thunderstorm, and a doctor and sheriff who go out for revenge.” Meanwhile, the 2012 sci-fi novel “Genocidal Organ,” focuses on a man masterminding civil war and hails from author Project Itoh (who penned the novelization of Hideo Kojima’s sci-fi military video game saga “Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of The Patriots”). The latter was adapted into an anime feature film in 2017 by writer/director Shūkō Murase and seems ripe for a live-action incarnation (and it gives us similar vibes to “Snowpiecer” from peer Bong Joon-ho).
The original book’s official logline via Amazon reads as follows:
The war on terror exploded, literally, the day Sarajevo was destroyed by a homemade nuclear device. The leading democracies transformed into total surveillance states, and the developing world has drowned under a wave of genocides. The mysterious American John Paul seems to be behind the collapse of the world system, and it’s up to intelligence agent Clavis Shepherd to track John Paul across the wreckage of civilizations and to find the true heart of darkness—a genocidal organ.
When and where these movie projects will be shot and their development stages are unknown as the director has had issues securing support for projects, but we’ll see if these come together a lot quicker than “The Ax” did, given their compelling premises.