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Long before the Oscar-winning director of Parasite became a household name, Snowpiercer was a battlefield. The film—a brutal, allegorical sci-fi thriller set on a perpetually moving train carrying the last remnants of humanity—was caught in a notorious tug-of-war between Bong and The Weinstein Company. Harvey Weinstein, infamous for his meddling, wanted to trim 20 minutes and add title cards to make the film more palatable to American audiences. Bong refused.
Whether the full workprint will ever see an official release is doubtful. Bong has moved on, and the theatrical cut (plus the excellent TV series adaptation) is widely considered definitive.
In 2019, a user on a private torrent tracker claimed to have uploaded the "Bong Joon-ho Workprint," but the file was quickly removed. Those who downloaded it reported that it was a low-quality VHS rip of a festival screener, complete with timecode counters and missing audio tracks. The consensus? It was authentic, but unwatchable for general audiences. The Snowpiercer workprint is more than just a collector's oddity. It represents the pure, unfiltered vision of a filmmaker before the system smooths out his edges. In a world where streaming services now release "director's cuts" as marketing gimmicks, the workprint is a relic of a grittier era—a time when you had to know a guy who knew a guy who had a burned DVD in a plastic sleeve.
But what if there was a version even more extreme, more raw, and more unhinged than the theatrical cut? According to legend, there was. First, a definition. A workprint is not a director’s cut. It’s not a final edit. It is the cinematic equivalent of a first draft—an assembly cut of the film, often created during post-production to test pacing, sound, and structure. Workprints typically contain unfinished visual effects (green screens, wire rigs, unrendered CGI), temp tracks (placeholder music taken from other films), and alternate takes.
However, the true "workprint"—the 140+ minute assembly cut with unfinished VFX—has never been officially released. It exists in the legal archives of CJ Entertainment and possibly on a dusty hard drive in Korea.
In the world of cinema, few things excite hardcore fans more than the fabled "lost cut"—a version of a film that exists in the shadows, whispered about on forums and buried in studio archives. For fans of Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 masterpiece Snowpiercer , that holy grail has a name: The Workprint .
