Best-selling novel of MBK Partners' founder to be made into movie

The cover page of "Offerings" / Courtesy of MBK Partners

A best-selling novel written by MBK Partners’ founder and chairman Michael ByungJu Kim will be made into a movie, his company announced on Tuesday.

A Seoul-headquartered private equity firm, MBK Partners said Kim’s book “Offerings” will be adapted into a film by American and Korean co-producers.

From the U.S. side will be Anonymous Content, a Los Angeles-based entertainment company acclaimed for two 2016 Oscar-winning films: “Spotlight” and “The Revenant.”

It will work with Anthology Studios, a Seoul-based company jointly founded by director Kim Jee-woon and actor Song Kang-ho.

The shooting of the film will begin in the fall of next year.

It will be directed by Anthony Shim, a Korean-Canadian who won multiple awards in Canada this year for “Riceboy Sleeps.”

Published in March 2020, “Offerings” is about a coming-of-age immigrant tale of a Korean-American investment banker, Dae Joon.

He graduated from Harvard Business School and was working on Wall Street, before finding himself back in Seoul as a part of an international team brought in to rescue Korea from sovereign default during the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis.

The book also portrays Dae Joon’s fate as the firstborn son, bound by tradition to follow in the footsteps of his forebears, however, he pursues a different future.

He is thrown into a dilemma when his closest friend from Harvard Business School, who is also a chaebol scion, asks for his help in saving the conglomerate and in continuining unscrupulous intergenerational business practices.

According to MBK Partners, Kim was inspired by his personal experience during the Asian Financial Crisis and worked on the novel for more than 20 years thereafter.

In a statement carried out by MBK Partners, Anonymous Content and Anthology Studios jointly said that “Offerings” depicts how an individual rediscovers his identity in a divided society.

They also said that Shim was the most capable director to depict the identity crisis on film.

After reading the novel, Shim said that he got “so into the characters that he couldn't get them out of his mind,” MBK Partners noted.