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FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
COSMO
COMEBACK
IN AN OFT-QUOTED
Sex and the City
scene, Carrie Brad-
shaw pulls up to a
McDonald’s drive-thru
and orders “a cheese-
burger, large fries,
and a cosmopolitan.”
The hot-pink, vodka-
based concoction de-
fined the sickly sweet
cocktail culture of the
early 2000s. And while
anything other than a
tequila soda might be
unthinkable in today’s
keto-loving world,
Pernod Ricard’s Abso-
lut predicts it will find
its way onto trendy
bar menus in 2020.
Banking on millennial
nostalgia, Absolut has
launched a marketing
campaign using the
hashtag #Cosmo-
Comeback and
suggests the cocktail
shows “you have a
global mentality, and
a concern for the finer
things in life.” Like
Manolo Blahniks and
brunch, perhaps.
—NICOLE GOODKIND
NOSTALGIA
MOVIES
PARASITE, THE HIT FILM from South Korean
director Bong Joon-ho, was the most
talked-about movie of 2019 in its home country, a
serious candidate for a Best Picture nod at the Oscars
(and a presumed shoo-in for Best Foreign Language
Film), and is on track to gross $20 million in the U.S.,
a windfall for a non-English title. The film checks
multiple boxes. It is a hilarious farce, a boy-meets-girl
tale with a twist, and a heartbreaking send-up of
income inequality in South Korea. In short, Parasite
has struck a chord worldwide at a time of maximum
rich-versus-poor tensions.
It is all the more noteworthy, then, that Miky Lee,
the film’s executive producer, is vice chairman of CJ
Entertainment and a granddaughter of the founder
of Samsung, from which CJ was spun out. In other
words, the film’s top financial backer is a member of
the most prominent family in South Korea—her first
cousin is Jay Y. Lee, the de facto head of Samsung
Electronics—the epitome of the social elite that Para-
site demonizes.
For CJ, backing Parasite and Bong, whom it has
financed before, is business as usual. What’s more,
Miky Lee has a track
record of supporting
artists, particularly
Korean actors who
have crossed power-
ful interests at home.
“Miky Lee has taken
a risk in investing in
dicey and innovative
films for the past de-
cade or so,” says Jinsoo
An, a professor in the
University of Califor-
nia at Berkeley’s East
Asian studies depart-
ment who studies Ko-
rean cinema. He cites
Park Chan-wook’s The
Handmaiden and Kim
Jee-woon’s The Good,
the Bad, the Weird, two
films CJ distributed.
Lee’s background not-
withstanding, says An,
her company is “liberal
and progressive,” and
she is “the most influ-
ential and powerful
female film producer
in South Korea.”
Parasite Producer
Pokes Fellow Elites
The breakout South Korean black comedy is
funded by a Samsung scion. By Adam Lashinsky
Biting the
hand that
feeds?
Parasite
producer Miky
Lee (top) and
her cousin
Samsung
Electronics
head Jay Y.
Lee.
COSM
O: ISTOCKPHOTO
—GET T Y IM
AGES; M
IK Y LEE: M
ICHAEL KOVAC
—GET T Y IM
AGES; JAY Y. LEE: CHUNG SUNG-JUN
—AFP VIA GET T Y IM
AGES
