Let’s hope this remake sticks for MBC. The station is looking toward their early 2018 lineup, and one of the contenders is a remake of 2003’s romance sageuk film Untold Scandal (also known as Scandal: The Love Story of Men and Women in Joseon); the remake is tentatively titled Love Game, The Great Seduction. Man, that’s a mouthful. The original film starred Bae Yong-joon (Legend), Jeon Do-yeon (The Good Wife), and Lee Mi-sook (Temperature of Love), and was a hit when it came out more than a decade ago, but I was surprised to hear that a main broadcaster was considering its drama adaptation because of its racy subject matter.
Love Game will be an adaptation of the Korean novel that was the source material for Untold Scandal, which was in turn loosely based on the 18th-century French novel Les Liaisons dangereuses. The French story is one that’s been adapted numerous times, most recently in 2012’s Dangerous Liaisons starring Jang Dong-gun and Zhang Ziyi, set in 1930s China. (There was also 1988’s Dangerous Liaisons starring Glenn Close and Michelle Pfeiffer, and you might also recognize the story from the 1999 teen movie Cruel Intentions, which transplanted the characters into modern New York City as elite high schoolers.)
In Untold Scandal, Bae Yong-joon and Lee Mi-sook played a pair of twisted aristocratic cousins who engage in a bet: If he is able to seduce Jeon Do-yeon’s character, a young widow of great virtue, he will get to finally sleep with Lee Mi-sook, who has previously resisted his advances. Jeon Do-yeon proves largely immune to his womanizing charms, and the main conflict begins when Bae Yong-joon’s character starts falling for the virtuous widow and Lee Mi-sook gets jealous.
I’m interested to see how the drama adaptation will tone down the racier bits of the film, which contained some pretty explicit scenes, and I can’t imagine MBC getting away with anything beyond mildly risque in its primetime offering. As of today, Love Game doesn’t have a director or writer attached to the project yet, but is currently in the early casting phase, so we should hear some news about the show soon.
Love Game is being planned for 16 episodes and is tentatively scheduled to follow I’m Not a Robot in MBC’s Wednesday-Thursday slot, starting in January.