Author Lee Mi-ye, right, and the cover of her fantasy novel “DallerGut Dream Department Store” / Courtesy of Factory Nine, Kyobo Book Centre
Hollywood is showing a growing interest in Korean storytelling that goes beyond K-dramas and K-pop, and the latest adaptation project highlights this expanding focus.
While Hollywood previously focused on acquiring finished series for streaming platforms or remaking proven box-office hits, major studios and publishers are now reaching further upstream. Instead of relying solely on mainstream hits, they are trying to secure rights to original literary works and older cult properties to rebuild stories from the ground up.
“The DallerGut Dream Department Store,” a fantasy novel written by Korean author Lee Mi-ye, is being developed into a live action movie by Disney, U.S. entertainment news outlet Deadline reported Aug. 12. Screenwriter Patrick Ness, known for adapting young adult works, including the “Chaos Walking” trilogy and “A Monster Calls,” will write the screenplay for the adaptation.
The story follows a protagonist Penny who sells dreams to sleeping customers at a department store, only to face a mystery when strange things begin to happen to the customers.
Lee’s novel sold more than 1 million copies in Korea following its 2020 release, becoming the first Korean novel published in the 2020s to hit that milestone. It has since been translated into more than 20 languages, reaching global sales of over 2 million copies.
The author, a former semiconductor engineer at Samsung Electronics, the story was born from her curiosity about why humans spend roughly a third of their lifetimes sleeping.
The Disney deal lands amid a broader wave of Korean intellectual property heading to English-language productions.
Director Kim Jee-woon, best known for the revenge thriller “I Saw the Devil” (2010) and period action “The Age of Shadow” (2016), is preparing “The Hole,” an English-Korean bilingual film based on Pyun Hye-young’s Shirley Jackson Award-winning novel of the same name.
The film stars British actor Theo James as a professor left paralyzed after a car accident that killed his wife, played by Jung Ho-yeon, star of Netflix hit series “Squid Game.”
Emma Stone acts in a scene from “Bugonia,” an English-language remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 cult favorite “Save the Green Planet!” Courtesy of CJ ENM
Genre filmmaking has proven especially exportable.
“Save the Green Planet!,” a 2003 Korean film directed by Jang Joon-hwan that flopped at the domestic box office before growing into a beloved cult classic, resurfaced last year as “Bugonia.”
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, the remake opened in theaters in the United States in October and in Korea in November.
Ma Dong-seok’s crime franchises are following a similar trajectory internationally.
His 2019 film “The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil” is currently being remade in the U.S., while his hit “The Roundup” series is separately being adapted in Japan, giving the same actor’s intellectual property parallel lives in two different markets.
The pattern extends into studio-level deals as well. Last October, Warner Bros. Discovery signed an agreement with CJ ENM to lead English-language remakes from the Korean studio’s film library.
In return, CJ ENM will develop Korean adaptations of Warner Bros. titles, establishing a two-way pipeline rather than negotiating rights on a title-by-title basis.
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