| A scene from the drama, "Extraordinary Attorney Woo," featuring actress Park Eun-bin, who plays lawyer Woo Young-woo / Courtesy of AStory, KT Studio Genie and Nangman Crew |
By Dong Sun-hwa
Korean legal drama series, "Extraordinary Attorney Woo," will be made into musicals in 2024, according to production company EMK Musical, Wednesday. EMK said it recently signed an agreement with AIMC ― a subsidiary of the drama's production company, AStory ― to create new musical theater works based on the series.
"We will pick three episodes from the original drama to produce three different musicals," EMK said in a statement.
EMK's CEO Um Hong-hyun added, "In the past, a lot of people offered their dramas to us to make into musicals, but we were uncertain whether we would be able to keep the charm of the original stories after condensing them. But in the case of 'Extraordinary Attorney Woo,' each episode has one quality story. So we thought we would be able to expand each of them on stage."
AStory CEO Lee Sang-baek said, "EMK is the company behind the success of several original productions like 'Mata Hari,' 'The Man Who Laughs' and 'Frida.' In cooperation with EMK, we will spare no efforts to produce new Korean content that can win the hearts of people around the world."
"Extraordinary Attorney Woo" follows the story of Woo Young-woo ― played by actress Park Eun-bin ― a genius lawyer on the autism spectrum who struggles to survive at a top law firm.
Thanks to its humanistic story and attractive characters, its viewership ratings soared to 15.8 percent on July 27 and have been at around 13-15 percent since then. The series has also topped Netflix's latest weekly viewership chart of non-English TV shows for the third week in a row.
It has been reported that the hit series will be getting a second season that will possibly be released in 2024. The production team, however, said it is still in talks with cable channel ENA over season 2.