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The King of Pigs (돼지의 왕)

The King of Pigs (돼지의 왕) is a 2022 South Korean crime thriller streaming series, a TVING original in 12 episodes that remakes director Yeon Sang-ho's 2011 animated film of the same name into a live-action serial-murder story about school violence and revenge.1 It was released from March 18 to April 22, 2022, with two episodes each Friday.2 • 3

Key factDetail
FormatTVING original series, 12 episodes, mystery/thriller genre1
RunMarch 18 to April 22, 2022, Fridays at 16:002
OriginLive-action remake of Yeon Sang-ho's 2011 animated feature The King of Pigs1
Director / writerKim Dae-jin (with Kim Sang-woo); screenplay by Tak Jae-young1
CastKim Dong-wook, Kim Sung-kyu, Chae Jung-An1
ProductionStudio Dragon and Hidden Sequence4
Rating19, restricted for minors, for violence and related content5

Spoilers

Premise

The drama follows two men who suffered school violence together in middle school twenty years earlier. Hwang Gyeong-min (Kim Dong-wook), traumatized as an adult, begins a series of murders against the perpetrators of the school violence he endured. His best friend of twenty years, Jung Jong-seok (Kim Sung-kyu), has become a violent-crimes detective and chases the killer while trying to prevent further murders; Detective Kang Jin-a (Chae Jung-An) assists him.1 • 2 A message left by an old friend at the scene of a serial murder draws out the characters' memories of violence, and the story alternates between the present investigation and the school days that shaped both men.6

The series frames its central question as whether a victim's private revenge can be justified. Screenwriter Tak Jae-young said the work is not only about school violence but asks more fundamental questions about why society is stratified into the strong and the weak and why violence exists there.7

Adaptation from the animation

The source is Yeon Sang-ho's 2011 animated feature The King of Pigs, a 96-minute thriller rated for adults only, which he made as an independent animation and which was the first Korean animation invited to the Cannes Film Festival.8 • 9 The original centered on the school-days story; the drama adds a new crime-thriller frame in which the most badly damaged victim, Gyeong-min, becomes a serial killer as an adult and the other victim, Jong-seok, becomes the detective investigating the case.3 Yeon described the drama as combining his original with a serial-murder investigation story, giving it a stronger genre color.10

Yeon Sang-ho, the director of Train to Busan and the series Hellbound, proposed the series adaptation and co-wrote the first two episodes with Tak Jae-young; after the scripts were delivered to the production company he took no further part in the writing.7 • 10 He said the drama answers a question audiences asked when the animation was released: what became of the perpetrators of the violence as adults.7

Production and release

The series was produced by Studio Dragon with Hidden Sequence.4 It was TVING's first self-produced genre work, a thriller, and part of the platform's expanded 2022 original lineup alongside titles such as Ghost Doctor, Monstrous, and Yumi's Cells S2.11 • 12 In July 2022 it was officially invited to the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal as the first drama series ever invited to that North American genre festival, which was in its 26th year.13

Place in Korean school-violence dramas

The King of Pigs appeared amid a wave of Korean dramas treating school violence frankly, including Weak Hero Class 1 (Wavve), The Glory (Netflix), and Juvenile Justice (Netflix). These OTT productions received adult-only ratings for explicit violence that terrestrial broadcasting had avoided, and critics connected their popularity to the global resonance of inequality and private revenge narratives.14 Compared with The Glory, whose heroine pursues a psychological revenge through exposure, The King of Pigs depicts a bloodier revenge in which the victim-turned-killer murders the perpetrators, and it ends on a notably bitter note rather than a relatively happy one.15

References

  1. The King of Pigs, Drama, CJ ENM
  2. The King of Pigs (Korean Drama), AsianWiki
  3. 학폭 피해자의 보복 살인극… '연상호 디스토피아' 영역 확장, 동아일보
  4. The King of Pigs (2022) crew, Letterboxd
  5. 티빙 오리지널 한국 드라마 시리즈 리스트, 한국학중앙연구원 dcollection
  6. 돼지의 왕 1화, TVING
  7. 드라마로 재탄생한 '돼지의 왕'…"피해자의 복수는 정당한가? 함께 고민하길", 중앙일보
  8. 돼지의 왕 다시보기, 키노라이츠
  9. 다양성 빛난다, 2010년대 한국 애니메이션 영화 7選, 싱글리스트
  10. 사적 복수 정당한가…연상호·탁재영이 돼지의 왕으로 던진 질문, 한국경제
  11. 지난 18일 시작한 <돼지의 왕>은 국내 OTT 티빙이 자체 제작한 첫번째 장르물, 다음 뉴스
  12. 티빙 총결산 및 2022년 라인업, CJ 뉴스룸
  13. '돼지의 왕', 캐나다 판타지아 필름 페스티벌 초청, 연합뉴스
  14. 실제로 '더 글로리' '돼지의 왕' '약한영웅' 등 학교 폭력 소재 드라마들, 다음 뉴스
  15. 돼지의 왕(드라마), 나무위키

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

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