Back in 2014, one of the biggest stories in the cinema world was the long-running war between studio mogul Harvey Weinstein and Korean director Bong Joon-ho over the American edit of Bong’s science fiction dystopia movie Snowpiercer. Weinstein wanted to cut 20 minutes from the 126-minute film, and Bong mounted a public fight against the edit. Snowpiercer finally made it to viewers intact, but only in a limited theatrical run, with a VOD release just two weeks after its big-screen debut. So it seems ironic that a film once considered too long for American audiences now may become a full-length TV series. According to Deadline, TNT has ordered a pilot for the show.
The initial details are sketchy but promising: Bong has signed on as a producer, alongside other Snowpiercer producers, including The Handmaiden and Oldboy director Park Chan-wook. Josh Friedman, creator of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, will write the pilot and serve as showrunner. Still, it’s hard to imagine what a Snowpiercer TV series would look like, unless it either erased the film and retold the story in a new way, or went back to the French graphic novels that Bong’s film adapted.
The film takes place in a dystopic horror-future where an attempt to repair the damage of global climate change brought on a new Ice Age that killed off most of humanity. For some reason, the survivors all boarded a train that endlessly circles the planet. The rich elite live up front in decadent luxury; the disenfranchised live in crowded, filthy quarters in the back, eating disgusting protein-gelatin and getting lectures in gratitude from Tilda Swinton. (“Know your place! Keep your place! Be a shoe!”) Then the MCU’s Captain America, Chris Evans, leads a rebellion against the train’s leadership, and the film ends in a way that leaves a little open-ended hope, but not much story left to tell — at least not on the train.
Ultimately, the biggest problem with Snowpiercer the movie was an unsatisfying ending that brought the rebellion plot up short for no clear reason, halting the action in favor of long, windy speeches. If Snowpiercer the series takes the original idea as a premise, and otherwise starts from scratch, it has the potential to build up the same complicated dramatic tension without squandering it because of a medium’s time constraints.