Every Version of Snowpiercer

Where It Started: A French Train Through the Ice

In 1982, French writer Jacques Lob and Belgian artist Jean-Marc Rochette published a bande dessinee called Le Transperceneige. The premise was brutal and simple: a second ice age has killed almost everything on Earth. The last survivors live on a perpetually moving train circling the globe, and the rigid class hierarchy inside that train is the story. Lob died in 1990 before he could finish the sequels he planned. Rochette continued the series with other writers, and the graphic novels quietly accumulated a cult following in France over the next two decades.

Then Bong Joon-ho read it. The South Korean director spent years developing a film adaptation, eventually shooting it in 2013 with an international cast. That film, released first in South Korea and then globally, became a flashpoint: an uncompromising science fiction allegory that managed to be both a midnight-movie action picture and a serious class-war parable. Its success opened the door for an American television series, and the world of the train suddenly belonged to a much wider audience.

Snowpiercer is one of the few stories that genuinely transformed at each stop. The graphic novel is dark, resigned, almost nihilistic. The film is kinetic and furious. The TV series is something else: a procedural thriller that plays the premise for sustained drama across three seasons. Each version keeps the train, keeps the cold, and keeps the class war. Everything else it reinvents.