How The King’s Warden sold 16 million tickets and saved the Korean box office

“I developed the very first treatment in 2018 while I was a development producer at CJ [ENM],” Lim says at the recent Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, alongside director Jang Hang-jun and actor Yoo Hae-jin, who plays the warden, Eom Heung-do. “The first draft screenplay by Hwang Seong-gu came out in 2019.”

Lim’s project explored the relationship between Yi and Eom in the 15th century. Eom, a village chief, offered to host Yi when the king was deposed by his uncle, Grand Prince Suyang. By doing so, Eom thought he could lift his village out of poverty, not anticipating that he would form a close relationship with the king.

“Financing historical films became noticeably harder,” Lim says. “Releases from a distribution company might drop from six or seven a year to two or three.”