What is ‘The Remarried Empress’, the series that has filled the Barcelona metro with advertisements?

BarcelonaOn one of the platforms of the Barcelona metro's blue line, a large poster shows two Korean women in sumptuous dresses and two men looking at one of them with longing. At the top appears the slogan “Happy the four of us... or not”, a phrase that inevitably makes one think of the song by Maluma. This poster and other variants can also be found on other lines in the city. They are advertisements for one of Disney+'s major projects, the Korean drama The Remarried Empress. It is an in-house production with which it wants to seduce the fans of k-drama that have brought so much joy to Netflix, the platform that has most and best capitalized on the craze for Korean romantic series.

Disney+, just like Prime Video, has for some time begun to pay attention to k-drama. Initially, the platform opted to incorporate into its catalog series it bought from South Korean television stations. The Remarried Empress, however, is a production made expressly for this streaming service. The series is based on an already successful product: it is an adaptation of a webtoon (a digital comic) written by Alphatart which has had 3 billion views. With these precedents, the expectation for the television version was very high. According to Disney+, in the first 48 hours, the trailer posted on YouTube and social networks had 13 million views, which is why they decided to bring forward the series' premiere date by one day (the launch was scheduled for November 4 and, finally, it was November 3 ).

The Remarried Empress is a visually baroque and exuberant series that touches on various genres, such as romantic period drama and fantasy. Set in a fictional empire with an aesthetic that is more Western than Eastern, it focuses on the complicated relationship between Empress Navier and her husband, Emperor Sovieshu. The marriage is in crisis due to the lack of an heir. With their relationship fractured, Sovieshu becomes infatuated with a slave, Rashta, whom he finds in the forest as she flees the abuse of her master. When he decides to make her his mistress, Navier agrees to the emperor's request on one condition: that she be allowed to remarry Crown Prince Heinrey of the Western Kingdom. The result is a story of power struggles and love that some media outlets compare to Bridgerton. The cast includes names quite well-known to k-drama fans, such as actress Shin Mina, very popular thanks to the success of Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha.

Central European locations

Despite being a Korean series, the production is very much in line with the great stories of princes and princesses that for a long time have been associated with the Disney brand. The result is a pastiche that is curious, fascinating, and surprising. To give grandiosity to the setting, it was filmed mainly in Central European locations. Production designer Lee Taehoon and producer Joy Chang explained to the website The set that one of the challenges was to create a world that could be fantastic and credible at the same time. “We wanted to show as much as possible the beauty that fans imagined while reading the webtoon”, explains Chang.

One of the main locations of the series is Schleissheim Palace, located in Bavaria. The footage filmed of the castle was modified with CGI to make it even more imposing. The team also filmed in the Czech Republic, where they used various mansions, gardens, and streets. One of the main aesthetic references was the Palace of Versailles, although they did not film there. This entire mix of references gives the series an atmosphere that brings to mind, among other things, Sleeping Beauty's castle, which has become a symbol of the different amusement parks that Disney has spread around the world.

A few days ago, Disney+ boasted that The Remarried Empress has been the best Korean premiere on the platform so far. The Korean Disney product that had achieved the most buzz until the arrival of this romantic drama had been Moving, an action and superhero series that captivated specialized critics and that has nothing to do with this tale of empresses and emperors.

The intense advertising campaign that the platform is carrying out with The Remarried Empress is confirmation of the desire to profit from the Korean cultural wave, popularly known as Hallyu and which has already been present among us for some time. Disney must compete with Netflix, which has a head start of years and has already experienced global phenomena such as Squid Game or K-pop Extreme Survival. In fact, the rival platform is currently promoting the drama 100 Days My Prince, a fiction that is successfully broadcast in South Korea on the TVN channel. The series is a historical drama set during the Japanese occupation of Korea. The protagonist is a young pickpocket who accepts a deal to infiltrate as an interpreter at the Japanese Government-General office for one hundred days and help a group of Korean independence activists. For the moment, in Spain, The Remarried Empress appears as the second most-watched series on Disney. On the other hand, 100 Days My Prince has not managed to enter the Netflix ranking.