Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. This week we’re talking to Studio N CEO Mikyung (Michelle) Kwon, the Korean banner behind Netflix hit Bloodhounds, last year’s Korean blockbuster My Daughter is a Zombie and recently-launched Disney+ epic The Remarried Empress. Since its launch in 2018, the Webtoon subsidiary has made 48 projects from webcomic IP and Kwon walks us through building the company and why The Remarried Empress is their biggest gamble yet.
Mikyung (Michelle) Kwon is not afraid to take a risk. As CEO of Studio N, the Korean production arm of Webtoon Entertainment, she’s helped to build a prolific slate of webcomic screen adaptations including Netflix hits Bloodhounds and The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call as well as last year’s Korean box office hit My Daughter is a Zombie.
But now the former CJ ENM and Disney Korea exec is taking what she says is the biggest creative gamble of her career to date with Disney+ romantacy series The Remarried Empress. The hugely anticipated show dropped its first four episodes on November 3 on Disney+ and Hulu, one day earlier than the originally scheduled November 4 premiere date thanks to early buzz from fans. The show’s trailer surpassed a whopping 13 million views in the first 48 hours on YouTube when it launched in September.
“This project will define my life,” Kwon tells Deadline of Studio N’s most ambitious and expensive production to date. “I have a lot of anxiety and expectation at the same time right now.”
It’s a bold statement from the veteran production exec whose banner has adapted 48 webcomics since its inception eight years ago. Based on the hit Naver Webtoon of the same name that drew nearly 3 billion views in 10 languages since it debuted in 2019, The Remarried Empress is hoping to harness that built in fanbase as well as new viewers, but Kwon notes the adaptation is a departure from the familiar conventions of Korean historical drama.
The lavish romance is set in a world of queens and kings and has a strong European flair and visual aesthetic rarely seen in K-dramas. Rather than relocate the story to a more familiar Korean historical setting, Kwon and her team were determined to preserve the original world from the webcomic by HereLee and illustrator Sumpul, which was based on the original web novel by Alphatart.
“We wanted to adapt it from the original work because it was such globally popular IP,” she says. “It was important to keep those original names because we wanted to retain that original feeling that comes from the webcomic. We wanted to show the castle in the background and the characters wearing these kinds of clothing, but we have never tried this in Korea before.”
Typically, she admits, a story like this would be adapted into a Korean historical period drama and characters would wear Hanbok, the traditional Korean wardrobe. But the team felt compelled to try something different.
The Remarried Empress, which premiered its first three episodes at the Busan International Film Festival last month, stars Shin Min-a, Lee Jong Suk and Ju Jihool and it follows the beloved Empress Navier (Min-a) who rules the Eastern Empire along with her husband Emperor Sovieshu (Jihoon). But when Sovieshu falls for a runaway slave and demands a divorce, Navier will agree on one condition: that’s she’s given approval to remarry rival Prince Heinrey of the (Jong Suk) of the Western Kingdom. What follows is a tale of love, lust and regret that threatens the fate of an entire empire as Navier strives to reclaim her power.
Studio N began developing the project in 2020 but finding the right creative team was a challenge. Yeo Geena and Hyun Choongyeol ultimately adapted the series, and Kwon admits that several directors turned the project down, with many feeling the material needed to have a more traditional Korean flavor. Cho Suwon (Still 17, Pinocchio) eventually boarded as a director and his fine-art background made him a perfect fit for the series.
“He said we shouldn’t be questioning anything about this,” she says. “He knew that if we were going to adapt this, we had to make it just as it is.”
The result is an ambitious production with hundreds of costumes and top-notch CGI to create a character who is both a prince and a bird, the latter of which Kwon admits was “the biggest challenge.” The production team scouted 16 castles all across Europe before selecting Schleissheim Palace, just outside of Munich, Germany, as its main location.
They also used an orchestra to score the music, something untypical for Korean TV series, but Kwon felt this was important as symphonic sounds compliment the magical realism of the story. “Because we have a castle and the characters dance and have these parties, we wanted an orchestra,” she says. “The music was one area that we really tried to execute at a different level.”
The Remarried Empress is the latest effort that has helped Studio N establish a solid position in Korea’s increasingly competitive production landscape. The company is wholly-owned by international operation Webtoon Entertainment, the group behind some of the world’s largest digital storytelling platforms such as Webtoon in the U.S., Naver Webtoon in Korea, Wattpad in Canada and Line Manga in Japan. Founded by Junkoo Kim in 2004, Webtoon pioneered the mobile-first webcomic format, designed to be read vertically by scrolling on digital devices versus a traditional multi-panel comic page. The company went public on Nasdaq in 2024 and now has around 155 million monthly active users and 27 million creators. Webtoon says it has paid a cumulative $2.78 billion to creators between 2021 and 2025.
Studio N (the ‘N’ stands for ‘next’) is one of Webtoon’s two production studios – the other being L.A.-based Webtoon Productions, which develops English-language adaptations from Webtoon and Wattpad outside of Korea.
Kwon joined Studio N at its inception in 2018 after serving as COO of CJ ENM’s film division. Prior to that she was in charge of marketing for CJ Entertainment and before that she was Director of Marketing for Walt Disney Korea Studios.
The business model at Studio N, says Kwon, begins with the original creators who retain the rights of their own work, so the company has to acquire the material from those creators before investing in development, hiring writers and attaching directors and actors.
The company is comprised of 16 producers, each responsible for identifying potential projects and, rather unusually, the selection process includes what she describes as a “super pass” system, which allows a producer to push a title into development even if the majority of the colleagues disagree. Kwon says this approach encourages diversity, with producers of different ages and backgrounds bringing different tastes into the mix.
“That’s really the strength of Studio N because we’re not just limited to a handful of genres,” she says. “We are able to cover a diverse library, and we really try to pursue that level of diversity.”
The company, she says, has honed a deep understanding of how to translate webcomics into screen format, something that requires a different approach from the traditional book-to-screen adaptation.
“Book to screen has been done so many times, but webcomic to screen is different and we specialize in that. We’ve been fine-tuning this for eight years and we know how these stories unveil themselves and how they will end.”
Kwon adds that webcomic and webnovel creators bring valuable creative freedom because they are not constrained by the conventions of TV storytelling. “They don’t have that fixed set of processes, so I think their imagination is actually more unlimited,” she says.
Studio N’s job is to translate that imagination into a workable screen adaptation, while also managing one of the biggest challenges when it comes to adapting established IP: its fandom.
“We need to embrace the fans,” Kwon says. “We need them to be rooting for us. Having the built-in fanbase is a pro, but it’s also the scary part because if we bring them something they do not want, that could be a big risk.”
My Daughter is a Zombie is a prime example of the importance of that relationship with fans. The original webcomic, she says, had a sad ending but when adapting the work for a feature film, Studio N opted to go with a happier ending. The team discussed the change with the Webtoon series creator Lee Yoon-chang, who ultimately supported their decision.
That sci-fi comedy, which sees a desperate single father and animal trainer attempt to retrain his zombie-infected teenage daughter back into society, ended up becoming Korea’s highest-grossing movie of 2025 and the country’s highest-grossing comedy ever, taking $34 million across 5 million admissions in 26 days.
Studio N’s wider slate is also demonstrative of the international potential of its adaptations: The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call spent five weeks at number one on Netflix’s global non-English TV chart in 2025, while The 8 Show topped the same ranking. Chicken Nugget, meanwhile, received a 2025 International Emmy nomination while the second season of Bloodhounds, which premiered on Netflix in April earlier this year, ranked in the global Top 10 for non-English series for two weeks.
The company is currently developing anime Gosu with Japan’s Toei Animation, and those international partnerships are key to Kwon. “We are having a lot of meetings with foreign partners,” she says. “We have partners in China, Japan, Thailand and Indonesia and there are a lot of people from different countries paying attention to us.”
She also adds that the group is keen to maintain flexibility in its relationships with buyers: “We prefer to match projects with partners whose interests suit their individual genres and audiences.”
Looking ahead, Kwon is interested in to exploring webcomic genres that have yet to make it to screen adaptation, notably large-scale disaster and post-apocalyptic stories. She’s also keen to move beyond the “high-dopamine storytelling” that she says is currently popular across platforms. “I think now people are starting to look for something that gives them a warm sense of humanity,” she says.
Kwon says Studio N’s long-term guiding philosophy is summed up by the company’s longstanding slogan: “Fun or nothing.”
“We want to be a production studio where we do fun things,” she says. “We don’t have specific targets beyond that. I have been in this industry for a long time and just because we aim for something doesn’t mean we will get there. When you really work for something without aiming specifically at a target, I think those are the cases where we will really see visible results.”
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