Highlights
- Kakao Entertainment is launching Perfect Crown in Royal Academy of Korea, a prequel based on Perfect Crown.
- Written by the original scriptwriter, the web novel offers a canon expansion with backstories of the characters from the K-Drama.
- The move reflects Kakao’s broader push to expand IP across formats and monetize global audiences.
Kakao Entertainment is expanding the universe of MBC's ongoing fantasy romance Perfect Crown beyond television with an official web novel. The webnovel, titled Perfect Crown in Royal Academy of Korea, will launch exclusively on Kakao Page on May 16, exploring the protagonists' untold school years across 30 chapters.
Perfect Crown in Royal Academy of Korea is written by the drama's own scriptwriter, Yoo Ji-won, making it a canon expansion rather than a licensed tie-in. As per The Korea Herald, the web novel will narrate the school days of the characters at the royal academy.
Apart from focusing on the Grand Prince I-an, the web novel will also explore the backstories of supporting characters Jung-woo and Yi-rang. To mark both the drama premiere and the webnovel launch, Kakao Page is running a prenotification cash event through May 16, alongside the release of five special illustrations drawn from the novel.
Perfect Crown Prequel Web Novel: An Adaptation of a High-Profile Drama
Perfect Crown is a 12-episode MBC series, directed by Park Joon-hwa and Bae Hee-young, starring IU and Byeon Woo-seok in the main roles. The plot centers on a chaebol heiress and a grand prince who enter a contract marriage, set in a fictional 21st-century South Korea with a constitutional monarchy.
The series lead Woo-Seok Byeon is one of the most high-profile South Korean actors, with popular works like Lovely Runner and 20th Century Girl. IU, on the other hand, has a singing background with acting credentials in Netflix’s When Life Gives You Tangerines and movies like Broker and Shades of the Heart.
On Disney+, which co-broadcasts the series globally, Perfect Crown generated the platform's highest-recorded viewership for a Korean series within its first five days of launch, topping the platform's global Korean content rankings.
The strong streaming performance and popularity tied to the high-profile actors are likely to influence the decision to expand the franchise with the Perfect Crown web novel. Notably, Perfect Crown in Royal Academy of Korea represents a structural shift in how Korean media companies monetize entertainment IP.
Generally, Korean and global broadcasters and streaming platforms adapt web novels and webtoons into live-action and anime formats. However, Kakao's Perfect Crown in Royal Academy of Korea subverts the trend.
Kakao Entertainment has formalized this approach as an explicit strategy, previously developing a spin-off webtoon of the Netflix series Gyeongseong Creature and producing web novels based on K-pop groups NCT and RIIZE. A Kakao Entertainment representative previously framed the cross-media adaptation model as a way to “further strengthen its intellectual property power” by expanding successful content across formats
