General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Sado (사도)

Sado (사도), released in English as The Throne, is a 2015 South Korean historical drama directed by Lee Joon-ik that dramatizes the death of Crown Prince Sado, who was confined in a rice chest on the order of his father, King Yeongjo, and died eight days later in 1762.¹^•² It stars Song Kang-ho as Yeongjo and Yoo Ah-in as Crown Prince Sado, and it was the highest-grossing Korean film of September 2015 with about 4.97 million admissions.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Korean / English title	사도 / The Throne; Italian title Il trono⁵^•⁶
Director / release	Lee Joon-ik; September 16, 2015, South Korea; 125 minutes¹
Cast	Song Kang-ho (King Yeongjo), Yoo Ah-in (Crown Prince Sado), Moon Geun-young (Lady Hyegyeong), Jeon Hye-jin (Yeongbin), Kim Hae-sook (Queen Inwon), with So Ji-sub as adult Jeongjo³^•⁷
September 2015 box office	1st place, 4.97 million admissions (만명 unit: 497), revenue 392억 won, 1,210 screens; distributor Showbox led the month with 29% market share⁴
Historical grounding	Director Lee Joon-ik stated the fact-to-fiction ratio is about 9 to 1, with 70–80 percent of dialogue taken directly from records such as the Hanjungnok⁸^•⁹
Major awards	7th 'Film of the Year' awards: Best Film, Best Actor (Yoo Ah-in), Best Supporting Actress (Jeon Hye-jin); 35th Youngpyeong Awards: Best Film, Screenplay, and Music¹⁰^•¹¹
International status	South Korea's candidate for the 2016 Academy Awards⁵

Spoilers

Subject and approach

The film retells the most infamous family tragedy of the Joseon dynasty. In 1762, Crown Prince Sado, the son of King Yeongjo, was ordered into a large wooden chest (뒤주) and died there after eight days of confinement.²^•³ In the film's framing, Yeongjo faces pressure from rumors about his own legitimacy as king, appoints his young son crown prince with high expectations, and the prince's preference for martial arts and painting over study deepens the conflict between father and son.⁶

Rather than staging the incident as court politics, director Lee Joon-ik treats it as a family tragedy. An SBS review notes the film's premise in the line spoken by Song Kang-ho's Yeongjo, "this is not a matter of state but a matter of the household," and observes that the story reinterprets the crown prince, long portrayed as a victim of factional politics, from the angle of father-son conflict.¹² The director himself framed the pairing as inseparable: "when we talk of Prince Sado we cannot leave out his father King Yeongjo, and when we try to understand King Yeongjo, we can't forget about Prince Sado."²

Production and historical grounding

Principal photography began on July 8, 2014, with scenes of the young Crown Prince Sado impressing the court with his intelligence.² The film was produced by Tiger Pictures and distributed by Showbox.¹

The production emphasized documentary-style fidelity to records. Lee Joon-ik said in an interview with Yonhap News that he examined every usable source, including the Joseon Wangjo Sillok, the Seungjeongwon Ilgi, and the Hanjungrok, and that 70 to 80 percent of the dialogue follows those records, with the overall fact-to-fiction ratio around 9 to 1.⁸ A scholarly study of the film describes it as a "jeongtong sageuk" (orthodox historical drama) faithful to historical fact, and notes that the Sado incident is described in most detail in the Hanjungnok (the memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong), making the film an adaptation of both history and a classic of Korean literature.⁹

Costume and makeup were designed for restraint rather than spectacle. The film uses about 1,500 costumes, more than double the 600 to 700 typical for a period drama, but the designer Sim Hyun-seop described the look as deliberately unobtrusive so the drama would not be interrupted.⁸ Song Kang-ho's Yeongjo was modeled on the king's surviving royal portrait (eojin), reproducing its long, dynamic beard, and required special-effects makeup lasting about four hours in summer heat for the 70-year-old king.⁸

Structure and narrative

The film opens at the climax rather than the beginning: its first sequence is the day the crown prince is sealed into the rice chest, from which the story moves back and forth in time between the present crisis and happier earlier years.¹²^•¹³ Lee Joon-ik divided the film into nine chapters to cover a 56-year family history spanning Yeongjo, Sado, and Jeongjo within roughly two hours.¹²

A Time Out review found the treatment of the well-known incident novel in its viewpoint: the story is told from Crown Prince Sado's position rather than Yeongjo's or Jeongjo's, developing through psychological portraits of the two men.¹³ Reviewers also noted elements with close historical attestation, such as the young Jeongjo bringing water to his imprisoned father and telling the blocking guard, "What is your name? I will remember you," an episode recorded in history and, according to anecdote, followed by Jeongjo punishing the guard after taking the throne.¹⁴

Reception and awards

Box office. Sado opened on September 16, 2015 on 1,210 screens and topped Korea's monthly box office for September with 4.97 million admissions and 392억 won in revenue, ahead of Ant-Man (2.83 million) and Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2.38 million). Showbox, which distributed Sado and two other titles, led the month's distributors with 5.42 million admissions and a 29 percent market share.⁴ Seven of the month's top ten films were Korean.⁴

Awards. The film collected a cluster of domestic honors in late 2015 and early 2016. The Association of Korean Film Journalists named it Best Film at the 7th 'Film of the Year' awards, with Yoo Ah-in winning Best Actor and Jeon Hye-jin Best Supporting Actress, making Sado that ceremony's most honored film.¹⁰ At the 35th Youngpyeong Awards, chosen by the Korean Association of Film Critics, it won three awards: Best Film, Screenplay (Cho Chul-hyun, Lee Song-won, and O Seung-hyeon), and Music (Bang Jun-seok).¹¹ The film was also selected as South Korea's candidate for the 2016 Academy Awards and closed the 2016 Florence Korea Film Fest.⁵

Sources and historical interpretation

The choice of focus mattered because the Sado incident has long been a contested episode in Korean historiography, entangled with factional politics and the ritual controversies of the late Joseon court.¹⁵ The KCI-indexed study by Jung Byung-sul of Seoul National University observes that as historical interpretations of the Sado incident have shifted, the direction of related screen productions has followed, and that Sado reflects recent scholarship in its interpretation; the same study notes that the film's use and transformation of history also reflect the influence of the film industry chain of investors, producers, distributors, and major cinema chains.⁹ A Herald Economy retrospective on the film's accuracy found that some dramatized details, such as whether Yeongjo acted in a fit of rage, diverge from the record, which instead suggests the chest was prepared deliberately as the only punishment that would not formally condemn Sado for treason and thereby endanger his son Jeongjo's succession.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › Historical dramas and epics › Titles M to Z › Titles M to Sa

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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