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A Rookie With a Worn Briefcase and Thirty-Seven Years on the Job
Having worked a long time and sitting in the lowest seat at a new job are two facts that rarely sit comfortably in the same sentence. The Korean remake of “The Intern,” opening September 16, begins precisely from that awkward pairing. Choi Min-sik plays Gi-ho, a man with thirty-seven years of career experience who nonetheless has to learn everything from scratch as a senior intern at a fashion startup — taking the seat once occupied by Robert De Niro, with one of Korean cinema’s defining veteran actors now sitting in it.
Han So-hee plays Sun-woo, the young CEO who built her company into a dark horse of the fashion industry within three years of founding it — the role that corresponds to the one Anne Hathaway played in Nancy Meyers’s 2015 original. One character has age and experience but is the newcomer within the organization; the other is young but carries the responsibility for every decision the company makes. The Korean version, too, begins its story from this mismatch between rank and age.
A New York E-Commerce Company Becomes a Korean Fashion Startup
The original told the story of Ben, a retired seventy-year-old man, joining a rapidly growing online fashion company as a senior intern. The Korean version relocates the setting to a fashion startup called “Wootootoo” and gives its two leads the names Gi-ho and Sun-woo. In the released trailer, Gi-ho pulls old office items — a thermos, a desk clock, a pencil case, an ink bottle — out of his bag, studying the language and working habits of his much younger colleagues.
What he names as both his strength and his weakness in the interview is the same thing: his age. Having a great deal of experience is an asset, he answers, but being old is, at the very same time, a liability. That single line compresses a paradox of the Korean labor market. In a culture built on seniority, a long career becomes authority; in a startup, that same long career can just as easily return as a prejudice — the assumption that someone can’t keep up with new technology and rapid change. Gi-ho stands in a position where he can lean on his experience but cannot use it as a right to command.
The Generation Gap Is More Complicated Than the Term “MZ Generation”
In the trailer, Gi-ho searches for “MZ generation,” the Korean shorthand that lumps millennials and Gen Z together, and picks up the slang his younger coworkers use. For a foreign audience, that term deserves to be understood as more than a simple age bracket. In Korean workplace discourse, “MZ generation” is often used as a convenient label for explaining horizontal communication, individual rights, and quick resignations — but in practice, it also tends to bundle two genuinely different generations together far too broadly.
So the real test for the Korean remake isn’t limited to whether Gi-ho generates laughs by learning young people’s culture. Sun-woo and her younger employees, too, have to correct the way they view older workers as relics of the past. The harder questions are when experience turns into wisdom and when it turns into interference, and whether a horizontally structured organization can actually absorb the differences that age and rank create. If generational reconciliation is completed with a few warm words of advice, the meaning of the remake narrows along with it.
The Reversal of Power Made by a Male Intern and a Female CEO
The structure of “The Intern” contains a reversal of gender as well as generation. An older man becoming the subordinate of a younger woman is still an unfamiliar sight in Korean workplaces. Gi-ho carries the seniority of decades in working life, but the company’s final authority rests with Sun-woo. That’s why it matters whether the film can portray this relationship as more than a father-daughter dynamic, and instead fully show the labor and authority a female executive actually carries.
Director Kim Do-young, who directed the film, dealt with the work, caregiving, and social pressure facing Korean women in “Kim Ji-young, Born 1982.” Her previous film, “Once We Were Us,” pulled off an unexpected box-office run, topping the daily box office over the New Year holidays ahead of “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” As a director who has translated the feelings of contemporary characters into popular storytelling, she carries the potential to turn the original’s warmth into the specific tensions of Korean workplace culture.
A Remake That Opens Chuseok Theaters a Week Early
The Korean version of “The Intern” opens September 16, roughly a week ahead of the Chuseok holiday. Because holidays are when generational differences within families surface most clearly, the story of an older man returning to work late in life alongside a young female CEO can naturally meet holiday audiences where they are. In that it needs to secure viewers ahead of Lee Chang-dong’s “Possible Love,” opening September 23, it also marks the starting point of this fall’s competition among Korean films.
A remake isn’t the work of translating a plot — it’s the work of rearranging social relationships. Rather than simply following the American original’s startup and retirement culture, the Korean version puts the vocabulary of a thirty-seven-year career, a senior intern, the “MZ generation,” and a female CEO front and center. Whether the meeting of Choi Min-sik and Han So-hee ends up merely repeating a familiar original, or becomes a mirror that newly reflects generation and power inside the Korean workplace, is something audiences can find out on September 16.
Source: Warner Bros. Korea official announcement, August 4, 2026; Liz Shackleton, Deadline, August 4, 2026; Moon Ki-hoon, The Korea Herald, August 7, 2026.
