Bradley Cooper will voice one of the characters in a new animated film from South Korean director Bong Joon-ho, a family adventure about a baby squid that rises from the depths of the Pacific Ocean after a mysterious flying object appears.

The project also brings in Dave Bautista, Anya Edebiri, Finn Wolfhard, Werner Herzog and Rachel House. Its production budget is set at $60 million, a figure that would make it the most expensive South Korean film ever made.

The film marks Bong’s first feature-length animation. It is being developed as a deep-sea adventure and is scheduled for global release in the second half of 2027, after post-production is complete.

That release window gives the project a long runway, but the real headline is already clear: Bong is stepping into animation for the first time with a cast packed with recognizable voices and a budget that resets the ceiling for South Korean cinema. For Cooper, it is another turn into a project that depends less on star presence than on performance through voice alone.

What makes the film more than a novelty is the scale attached to it. A $60 million budget is not just ambitious by local standards; it is a statement that the studio backing the film expects an animation with international reach. The story itself, centered on a squid’s climb toward the surface after a strange object appears above the ocean, suggests a blend of wonder and unease that fits Bong’s reputation for turning genre material into something stranger and more precise.

Bong’s move into animation follows years of development on the project between 2024 and 2026, and the cast list shows the film is being built as a broad ensemble rather than a one-star vehicle. Bautista, Edebiri and Wolfhard add younger and action-oriented appeal, while Herzog and House widen the tonal range even further.

The tension now lies in whether a film this costly, and this unusual, can land with audiences when it finally reaches theaters in late 2027. The answer will say a lot about how far South Korean cinema can stretch beyond its traditional scale, and how much room there is for an animated adventure that starts on the ocean floor and aims for a global audience.