Following an underwhelming 2020, it looked like A24 was going into an awards season slump. Of the three films they had released, none of them garnered more than small critical acclaim and weren’t destined to make it to Oscar Night. If it seemed like they were entering an uncertain time, so was the entire film industry. It was the year of the pandemic, when theaters were shut down and nobody knew how to hold onto the old way of viewing cinema. As a result, The Academy decided to push back their ceremony date and, in the process, gave A24 one last chance to win over voters with an unexpected Sundance hit. Minari (2021) was more than a saving grace. It became one of the studio’s most recognized achievements, earning them their first Oscar win since Moonlight (2016) and redesigning what a family drama could be.
The story begins around 2018 when director Lee Isaac Chung found himself at a crossroads. Despite having a lengthy film career, he was experiencing a rut that made him contemplate giving up the profession. He had accepted a teaching job at the University of Utah’s Asia Campus in Incheon. Everything was moving forward to the next stage of life when he took one final shot at potentially making a film. As described in an essay for the Los Angeles Times, Chung mentions his experience one day hearing the name “Willa Cather” in the ether. This was in large part because of the author’s work being added to the public domain which encouraged him to visit a library to consume his work.
Upon falling in love with “My Antonia,” Chung was inspired to adapt it into a film. He was also struck by the quote, “I ceased to admire and began to remember.” Basically, Cather was a rural farmer who initially wrote Edith Wharton-style prose about the upper class that never connected with audiences. It was only when becoming personal that he found success. Chung was dismayed when discovering that Cather had written about disappointment with Hollywood previously adapting work and decided to never have a film made again. As a result, Chung wrote personal anecdotes of his youth, collecting memories of being part of a farming family. Of the 80 reported memories, he mixed them together to form the screenplay that would become Minari. Finding inspiration, he set out to make the film.
Chung had conflicts making the film, though mostly in how much he wanted to be autobiographical. At times he mistook the Yi family for his own. However, crew members acknowledged that this wasn’t his autobiographical tale. Even then, actor Steven Yeun played a character roughly based on Chung while Youn Yuh-jung was told not to embody the warmer elements of his mother. This was also allowed to be a discussion on how Asian-American families were treated in more conservative midwestern states. While the screenplay was written in English, Chung allowed crew members to adapt it into Korean to allow the family to feel more authentic.
The film was shot over 25 days and the cast had a good time. While Yeun did his best to play the father figure keeping things going, Yuh-jong found her own interesting challenge. While she’s considered one of the biggest actresses in South Korea, the choice to film an American film encouraged her to find new ways to impress viewers. There was a close bond with many actors sharing Air BNB to save money. There was a reverence for each other that allowed everything to develop naturally. It came to the point that Chung admitted that he wasn’t fully sure what the movie would be until they got into the editing room.
As with many films that had a premiere in 2020, the story from here isn’t that straightforward. The film first appeared at Sundance in 2020 where it also won The Grand Jury Prize. It would go on to receive distribution rights from A24. However, it would be almost a year before a proper film rollout. In its place was uncertainty about what the studio would do to face a pandemic that shut theaters down. While they had films like Boys State (2020) and On the Rocks (2020) that would help launch AppleTV+, those films proved to underperform when it came to awards season. Minari wasn’t a film they necessarily wanted to gamble on a new approach and instead held onto whatever future release strategy they could use.
There were a handful of caveats that would help A24 figure out how to progress. For the first time in history, The Oscars announced that they would allow streaming movies to be eligible for major awards. Because of the strange year, they were also pushing the ceremony back to late April, meaning the window of eligibility was also running into the early months of 2021.
While A24’s three actual 2020 films failed to make the cut, there were early signs that this road would be fortuitous. For starters, the film received some of the studio’s highest critical acclaim with many calling it one of the best movies of 2021. Following a one-week digital release in December, it received a theatrical run in February that resulted in a hefty $15.5 million box office which, on a $2 million budget, proved to be one of the studio’s biggest success stories in years. As it racked up honors like American Film Institute’s Top 10 Movies, it was clear that if A24 had to have one pony in this race, it was this one.
One of the earliest stops on the road to Oscar Night was The Golden Globes. While the voting body was on the eve of its own controversies, it caused conflict with Minari especially. Following the previous ceremony’s notoriety with The Farewell (2019), there was confusion and annoyance over it being nominated (and ultimately winning for) Best Foreign Language Film. Chung would admit that the studio had no choice but to submit it there based on their guidelines. Despite being an American film, the choice to only recognize it in this film delineated a difference between what it meant to be an American. Given the ongoing rise of crimes committed against the AAPI community, it especially felt like an odd way of singling them out and keeping the film from achieving its truest potential victory. This also came in the wake of Parasite (2019) winning Best Picture and raising the question about Asian representation and the importance of Asian-American representation in awards season films. Minari was praised for reflecting the lack of monolithic culture on top of being one of the best family films of the year.
By the time of The Oscars, it was a clear favorite in several categories. The film would earn six nominations including Best Picture. Yeun would become the first Asian-American and first actor of East Asian descent to be nominated for Best Actor. Similarly, Yuh-jong became the first Korean actress to win Best Supporting Actress. During the category’s presentation, she was praised as South Korea’s Meryl Streep and was considered to have one of the more enjoyable speeches of the night. She would ultimately be the film’s only win. In later years, it would end up on many Best Movies lists, including those of the 2020s and, in the case of Forbes, The Top 150 Greatest Films of the 21st Century.
As one can expect, this means that Minari was one of the most critically acclaimed films in A24 history. On critics aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, the film earned 98%, thus making it one of the few films with a near-perfect rating. Of those praising the film, Esther Zuckerman of Thrillist led the enthusiasm when stating, “Chung and his cinematographer Lachlan Milne photograph the landscape beautifully, and you see how both Jacob and David can be entranced by its vastness, even for all the trouble it causes.” Jae-Ha Kim of Teen Vogue shared sentiments when claiming, “Minari deconstructs the American dream. While it’s a specific story about one Korean American family, it also is a universal tale about everyone who has dreamed for a better future.” Marie Asner of Phantom Tollbooth was one of the few who disagreed when retorting, “The film moves at a leisurely pace and each new episode is like the scene in a play, though sometimes disjointed. The audience can predict what is going to happen next.” Overall, it was a film that proved A24’s gift for finding quality voices in unique places.
As the years have carried on, Minari has become one of the studio’s most recognizable films. Even in its ability to tell a story that’s different from its average fare, it found something heartwarming and universal. The studio was setting itself up for 2021 which could arguably find them exiting the other side of the pandemic with a forceful presence in the film conversation. The question was if this would be if they could find ways to stand out in a market still redefining their potential. Following a zig, they zagged into the world of streaming horror with a film that addressed some hard-hitting issues around reproductive rights. It also raised an interesting question: could they find yet another market to corner on Hulu, or would this be another under the radar misfire?
Coming Up Next: False Positive (2021)
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