Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone are teaming up again – will it bring more awards glory?

The movie is a sci-fi conspiracy thriller about two men who believe a powerful CEO is secretly an alien.

By Joe Allen Published October 17, 2024

Emma Stone in Poor Things — 20th Century Studios

There are few things more guaranteed in this world than another collaboration between Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos. Stone and Lanthimos appear to be a match made in heaven, and have already collaborated on The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness, and the two are now working together on a movie called Bugonia.

The film is a sci-fi-inflected conspiracy thriller, and co-stars Alicia Silverstone and Jesse Plemons. According to Variety, it tells the story of two conspiracy-obsessed young men who become convinced that the CEO of a major company is actually an alien bent on destroying the Earth, and so decide to kidnap her. The film was written by Will Tracy, who also wrote The Menu and was a writer on Succession. It’s based on the 2003 South Korean comedy Save the Green Planet.

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Given the film’s pedigree, it seems distinctly possible that the movie could be an awards season player. Two Lanthimos’s collaborations with Stone have yielded incredible success with awards bodies. Both The Favourite and Poor Things took home the Best Actress awards at their respective ceremonies for Olivia Coleman and Stone, respectively, and were also nominated in a wide variety of other categories.

This is in spite of the fact that Lanthimos’s films tend to be strange in ways that many Oscar-season favorites are not. Even so, the Academy seems to have glommed on to something about his approach, and the same must be said for Stone, who is now making her fourth movie in collaboration with the Greek director. Bugonia is set to hit theaters sometime in 2025.

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Joe Allen is a freelance culture writer based in upstate New York. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The…

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