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Korean box office hit has fans review-bombing a Joseon king’s tomb

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Korean box office hit has fans review-bombing a Joseon king's tomb

‘The King’s Warden’ is dominating cinemas. It’s also turning map apps into battlegrounds and a remote exile site into a pilgrimage destination

If you pull up the Naver Map listing for Gwangneung — the royal tomb of King Sejo, seventh monarch of the Joseon Kingdom, nestled in the outskirts of Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province — you’ll find a torrent of one-star ratings and emotionally charged rebukes that have been piling up over the past few weeks.

“How could you do that to your own nephew,” one reads. “Burn in hell forever you psychopath,” says another. The vibe is less travel review, more public score-settling.

The scene at the grave of Han Myung-hoe, the cunning strategist who engineered Sejo’s rise to the throne, located in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province, is much the same. Reviewers called him a “traitor” and a “disgrace,” some pairing the insults with memes and stills from a certain movie.

The deluge spread across the country’s major map and navigation apps so fast that Kakao, Korea’s other dominant mapping platform, activated its “safe mode” — a feature that temporarily hides reviews when a location gets brigaded with irrelevant posts.

The culprit, if you can call it that, is “The King’s Warden,” the period drama that has steamrolled the Korean box office since opening on Feb. 4. Directed by filmmaker and popular TV fixture Jang Hang-jun, the film reimagines the final days of Danjong, the tragic boy king who inherited the throne at 12 and was dead by 17.

Dethroned by his uncle Sejo, he was exiled to the far-flung mountain county of Yeongwol in Gangwon Province. He died there a few months later.

As of Friday, the film had drawn 4.4 million admissions according to the Korean Film Council’s box office tracker and stands as the most-watched film of the year by a long shot (the runner-up, “Once We Were Us,” stands at 2.4 million).

It emerged as the runaway winner of a Lunar New Year box office that pitted three domestic releases against each other, with daily ticket sales climbing steadily throughout.

At this rate, the numbers are all but certain to cross 5 million over the weekend. Only four films cleared that milestone in all of 2025. Distributor Showbox also announced Thursday that the film has been invited to the main competition at Italy’s Udine Far East Film Festival.

The history itself, as any Korean will tell you, is grim stuff. The tale of Danjong is one of those tragedies that every Korean grows up hearing, retold across generations. Danjong’s uncle, Grand Prince Suyang, overthrew the boy’s regents in a bloody 1453 coup that left many of the court’s top officials dead. He forced his nephew to abdicate two years later, then had him killed in exile — by poison or strangulation, depending on the source.

A royal decree warned that anyone who recovered the body would be punished for three generations. But the deposed king had his sympathizers among the common people, many of whom had risked their safety to serve him in exile.

One stood out in particular — a Yeongwol local named Eom Heung-do, who the chronicles say secretly collected the remains, laid the boy king to rest in the mountains and disappeared into hiding.

The film builds its story around that thin sliver of historical record, largely reimagining the man’s background and social standing. What we get on screen is Yoo Hae-jin playing him as a canny village chief who initially sees the exiled king as a meal ticket before forming a genuine bond with him. Park Ji-hoon, the former K-pop idol, delivers an equally convincing performance as Danjong in his first feature lead.

On the other side of the ledger, Yoo Ji-tae plays Han Myung-hoe, the ruthless kingmaker who orchestrated Sejo’s seizure of the throne. Sejo himself never appears on screen, but that hasn’t stopped audiences from lashing out at him on every platform available.

But the biggest real-world impact has landed squarely on Yeongwol, the remote mountain county where it all happened. Tourism exploded during the Lunar New Year holiday, with visitors flocking to Cheongnyeongpo, Danjong’s place of exile, in particular.

That place is a riverside peninsula hemmed in by water on three sides and sheer cliffs on the fourth; the only way in or out is by boat across the river. Long lines formed at the dock as visitors waited to make the crossing, following the same path Danjong once took after losing everything.

Inside, visitors walked through a reconstruction of the king’s modest quarters and past a pine tree locals have nicknamed after Eom Heung-do. They climbed to the lookout point where Danjong supposedly gazed toward the capital, longing — so the history says — for the young wife he’d never see again.

A total of 10,641 tourists visited Cheongnyeongpo during the holiday period, more than five times the 2,006 recorded during the same period last year, according to county officials.

The 59th Danjong Cultural Festival, scheduled for late April, is now gearing up for what organizers expect to be a significantly larger turnout than usual.

submitted by /u/coinfwip4
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