I’m not quite sure how to feel about this piece of news: Ryu Joon-yeol (Taxi Driver) has just been offered Tazza 3, the third in a line of movies about high-stakes gambling. The first one, Tazza: The High Rollers, was suuuper good, starring Jo Seung-woo and Kim Hye-soo as master cardsharps. But the subsequent drama adaptation (Tazza) and movie sequel (Tazza 2: Hand of God) were decidedly lackluster.
According to C-JeS Entertainment, Ryu’s management agency, he’s positively reviewing the offer, but nothing has been decided. He’s had a busy year so far, adding his tsundere charm to several movies, including the award-winning Taxi Driver and political corruption film The King. There are a couple other projects still in the pipeline for 2018 including Little Forest with Kim Tae-ri and Money with Yoo Ji-tae. So 2018 already looks tightly scheduled for him, but perhaps this opportunity to star in such a well-loved franchise as Tazza might prove to be an opportunity too good to pass up.
As of yet, no other actors have signed on, but up-and-coming director Kwon Oh-kwang, whose debut film Collective Invention enjoyed moderate box office success, will be helming the movie. Both the first movie (starring Jo Seung-woo) and drama (starring Jang Hyuk) were centered around Kim Go-ni, the main character of the original manhwa, but the film sequel (starring TOP) featured Kim Go-ni’s nephew. So I’m not sure which storyline this next Tazza film will follow, or if it’ll be a completely different spinoff story entirely.
I’m hoping Yoo Hae-jin makes at least a cameo in it, because he was one of the only characters who carried over in Hand of God, and perhaps the only redeemable thing about the movie. The other character who was carried over was Kim Yoon-seok’s Agui, the ultimate evil from the first movie who made a very brief special appearance. I must confess—I wanted Yeo Jin-gu in the next Tazza installment because it was hinted in the second movie that he was Agui’s psychopathic apprentice. And it would have been awesome to follow a storyline where a prodigy trained from childhood to become a ruthless gambling den king would one day see the light and destroy the empire bequeathed to him from within. In addition, it would just have been a delicious meta situation because Yeo Jin-gu also played Jang Hyuk’s youth counterpart in the drama adaptation. But Ryu Joon-yeol would definitely be an awesome alternative.
No final confirmations yet, but hopefully if things go well, we’ll see Tazza 3 in theaters by the start of 2019.