The popular web novel Chasing Red from Wattpad, the web novel platform under Webtoon Entertainment, the U.S. headquarters of Naver Webtoon, will be produced as a Hollywood film next year.
According to Naver Webtoon on the 27th, a film of the same name based on Chasing Red will go into production early next year. Madelaine Petsch of the Netflix series Riverdale and Gavin Casalegno of the Amazon Prime series The Summer I Turned Pretty will star.
Distribution will be handled by Mister Smith Entertainment. It will be released as an Amazon Prime Video film in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and France, and is also set to open in Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and India.
Chasing Red is an English-language web novel by writer Isabelle Ronin that has recorded 260 million cumulative views on Wattpad. This is the second-highest view count of all time on Wattpad. It tells the romance of star basketball player Caleb and an independent woman, Veronica. In 2023, it was also made into an English original webtoon by Naver Webtoon and garnered 24 million views.
Naver Webtoon said, "In Hollywood, cases of adapting from web novels to webtoons and then to films or drama are still rare, but in Korea they have already become a proven formula," adding it plans to bring this to the United States.
In Korea, there are already many success stories that started as web novels, were made into webtoons, and expanded into films or drama, including Reborn Rich, The Trauma Code: Heroes on call, and The story of Director General Kim who works at a large corporation while owning a home in Seoul.
Since 2022, Naver Webtoon has adapted popular titles on Wattpad, the web novel platform under Webtoon Entertainment, into webtoons. Starting with The Owl and Summer Sky, Float, Chasing Red, Death Is My BFF, and Love Bites were produced as English webtoons and gained popularity.
Naver Webtoon expects that if the Chasing Red film succeeds this time, the value of web novel and webtoon intellectual property (IP) in the U.S. entertainment industry will rise.
Halli Stanford, CEO and executive producer of 7 Crow Stories, said, "As a producer, when you take on a webtoon, you inherit a world that is already complete," adding, "Because the original creators have already tested and refined the story, producers can use that to attract the best A++ talent."