At one time the director Jang Hang-jun, who once shed tears over an investment setback, has finally reached the rank of a 10-million-audience director. The film The King's Warden surpassed 10 million viewers, yielding the fruits of his long time and effort.
The film The King's Warden exceeded a cumulative audience of 10 million as of 6:32 p.m. on March 6, its 31st day after release. With this, the work became the fourth historical drama to reach 10 million viewers in history, following King and the Clown, Masquerade, and The Admiral: Roaring Currents. It is also the first 10-million-audience film in about two years since 2024's The Roundup: Punishment, injecting vitality into a movie theater industry that had been stagnant.
Above all, this achievement is more meaningful as it recalls the times of frustration the director Jang Hang-jun experienced in the past.
He once revealed on the tvN program A Ridiculously Useless Encyclopedia of Mysterious Humans that a film he had been preparing was canceled at the final investment stage. Director Jang recalled, There was a big-budget film I had been preparing for nearly three years, but the investment fell through, and at the time the pay structure was different so even after years of preparation I did not receive a single penny.
He continued, I told the staff, 'I'm sorry. If the director had been someone else, the same script would have gotten investment,' recalling the bitter situation at the time. At that moment his wife, writer Kim Eun-hee, interjected jokingly with "That's right, that's right," trying to lighten the mood, but the wound in his heart did not heal easily.
Director Jang said, While taking a designated driver home, a song that I had wanted to use as the ending song for that film played on the radio, and at that moment I cried so hard I wondered if I had been that devastated. The comfort offered by writer Kim Eun-hee then was simple. He said, My wife patted her knee beside me and said, 'Lie down here,' and I went home lying on Kim Eun-hee's knee, crying my eyes out, leaving a deep impression.
But director Jang Hang-jun turned that frustration into new creative momentum. He recalled, Another idea came to me and I started writing, and it felt like a new world was unfolding.
And in 2026, those accumulated times eventually resulted in The King's Warden. The film, which captured audiences' hearts with the actors' powerful performances and a solid story, became the biggest box-office hit of 2026 and gave director Jang Hang-jun the title of a 10-million-audience director for the first time. Once a director who had to rest his head on his wife's knee and cry. But in the end he stood in front of the camera again, and that story finally culminated in the applause of 10 million viewers.
[Photo] 'broadcast screen'
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