Director Showdown – Round 1, Match 8 – Bong Joon-ho vs. Adam McKay
December 3, 2025
It’s time for the long-awaited episode 8 of Director Showdown! In this series, we pit 64 of the biggest directors to debut since 1998 against each other in an elimination bracket to determine who will walk away the greatest director of the last 27 years!
In the last episode, we saw a clash of titans with Apichatpong Weerasethakul vs. Ava DuVernay, both with a film about how the sins of the past inform the issues of the present. Between Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Origin, the Palme d’Or winner ultimately came out on top, with Weerasethakul taking the record for first-round winner with the longest surname!
This week, we try to imagine a world without capitalism… and end up just imagining the end of the world instead!
Up first, we have another Palme d’Or winner. Hailing from South Korea, Bong Joon-ho really made a splash in the West when his 2019 film Parasite became the first Asian movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Of course, by the time it won, it was hardly a surprise: Parasite had already picked up the Palme d’Or and 3rd place at the TIFF People’s Choice earlier that summer!
But before Parasite, Bong had already established himself with films like Memories of Murder, The Host, and even a couple of Hollywood films like the Netflix-released Okja. Today, our hosts talk about Bong’s biggest sci-fi hit: Snowpiercer. Starring Chris Evans, John Hurt, and Song Kang-ho, Snowpiercer is a climate-conscious thriller about a popular uprising on the world’s last surviving train during a new ice age.
Opposite Bong is Adam McKay! A longtime collaborator of Will Ferrell, McKay cut his teeth in comedy with films like Talladega Nights, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and The Other Guys. In recent years, McKay pivoted slightly, moving away from outright comedies and into comedically-tinged political dramas. In recent years, McKay’s even proven himself a regular at the Oscars with films like Vice and Don’t Look Up — which we covered in episode 18 of our series Losing It Over Leo. But the first of those dramedies was the Ryan Gosling/Christian Bale/Steve Carrell-starrer The Big Short. Centred around a group of Wall Street investors who recognize the subprime mortgage bubble before it became the subprime mortgage crisis, The Big Short tells the true story of how a handful of millionaires profited off the misfortune of a whole country. It also does a great job of answering the question on everybody’s minds: what is a “subprime mortgage”?
Joining us today is a repeat guest: Mark Morgan of Rambling Cinema! Mark was last heard on Match 4 of Director Showdown, where his passionate advocacy for Darren Aronofsky was ultimately unsuccessful in carrying the mother! director to victory. Will his favourite prevail in this episode? You’ll have to tune in to find out!
This episode was inspired by Rotten Tomatoes’ Best Director Showdown, which was conducted among RT users over the summer of 2023. The results of that competition are summarized in this article.
Special thanks this week to our good friend Cris, who made the cover art for this episode! Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Letterboxd to see more of her artwork, film opinions/reviews, or both!
