“Descendants of the Sun,” a South Korean TV drama, is ruling it over Chinese and South Korean TV and radio with its record-breaking viewership, hitting as high as 31.2 percent in Seoul, and selling millions of songs from its track.
On April 22, another joint Chinese and South Korean collaboration would aim to also break records in the box office. "My New Sassy Girl," a remake of the 2001 hit with a similar title, would be shown in mainland cinemas. The remake has the same theme as the original – boyfriend abuse, reported China Daily.
Cha Tae-hyun, the abused boyfriend in the 2001 version, was tapped to play the same role for the 2016 version. But Jun Ji-hyun, the South Korean actress who portrayed the girlfriend, has been replaced by Song Qian, a Chinese model and actress, tapped to play the role of Cha’s new sassy girl.
The characters they play have secret crushes on each other since they were in primary school. When they became adults, they reunite and eventually married. The romance as well as the theme “love could be blind, risky and difficult to predict,” are the focal points of the new romance movie, Cha said at a Beijing media event recently.
Other cast include Jin-ho Choi, a South Korean actor, and Mina Fujii, an American-Japanese actress. The film was directed by Jo Geuk-shik, a veteran South Korean director.
Last month, in a life imitating art moment, a real-life sassy 26-year-old South Korean woman hit a hotel employee of The Peninsula in Tsim Sha Ysui in Hong Kong, although in this case, the hotel staff was not her boyfriend. Rather, Cheung, a security officer, attempted on Feb. 12 to break the fight between the sassy girl and her male friend over some trivial issue. The feisty woman threw her phone which hit Cheung who was hospitalized, reported ejiinsight.