The King of Kings (2025), an animated feature film about the life of Jesus Christ, has broken the US box office record previously held by Parasite (2019), which earned $53.25 million following its historic Best Picture win at the Academy Awards. Aimed at younger audiences and carrying strong religious themes, The King of Kings has managed to cross a boundary of cultural sensitivity that might otherwise have confined it to a niche market. Remarkably, the film’s original story is credited to none other than Charles Dickens. Produced and directed by a Korean visual effects specialist and voiced by a stellar cast of global superstars, this hybrid creation raises a provocative question: how did such an unlikely combination surpass even an Oscar-winning phenomenon?
It was a long-term endeavor that took ten years of his life and tested both his endurance and resilience: for The King of Kings producer and director Jang Seong-ho, the film was nothing short of a personal and professional marathon. In an interview with the Korean press, Jang explained that he wanted to make a film about Jesus Christ not only because he is Christian, but because he believed Jesus is a figure who transcends cultural boundaries and requires no translation. Perhaps his calculation was that Jesus, as a universally recognizable subject, could anchor a film with immediate global appeal—and commercial potential. Jang’s instincts proved to be anything but misguided: by the end of this year, the film is expected to be released in approximately 120 countries.
Jang is a veteran of the Korean film industry and CEO of MOFAC Studio, a Seoul-based special effects and animation company founded in 1994. The studio has contributed visual effects to a number of major Korean productions, including Joint Security Area (2000), Tidal Wave (2009)—a disaster film set in the coastal city of Busan—and The Admiral: Roaring Currents (2014). His decision to adapt The Life of Our Lord, a little-known devotional text Charles Dickens wrote between 1846 and 1849 for his children (and published posthumously in 1934), was not initially met with enthusiasm from potential investors. Though Jang was a seasoned figure in visual effects, he had never directed a film before, and his debut project required a budget of approximately $25 million—an unusually large sum for a first-time director in the Korean market.
From my perspective, the timing of the project raises intriguing questions. Why adapt a religious story written more than a century ago? What relevance could it possibly hold for contemporary audiences? Furthermore, can such a text be faithfully or meaningfully interpreted by a filmmaker whose cultural, linguistic, and historical background is far removed from that of the original author? Apart from his Christian faith, Jang seemed to possess no obvious credentials that would position him as an authoritative interpreter of this arcane tale.
Yet the film is surprisingly engaging with an unexpected gesture of intimacy: Charles Dickens, as a character within the story, is depicted attempting to be a good father to his unruly son, Walter. As the narrative unfolds, Dickens becomes both a storyteller for his son and the film’s narrator. He is positioned as a narrator-father. Perhaps it is this small window of connection—one rooted in storytelling as an affective gesture between generations—that inspired Jang to take on the project. And perhaps it is precisely this affective framing that has made the film resonate so deeply with the viewers.
A Time Travel by Charles Dickens
In the opening scene, Charles Dickens stands on the stage of a Victorian theater, recounting the story of Scrooge from A Christmas Carol. As he approaches the story’s climactic moment—Scrooge’s encounter with the ghosts—he is interrupted by his son, Walter, and Walter’s cat, who stage their own performance of King Arthur and his adventures at the side of the stage. Walter is enthralled by the heroic legends of Arthur. On their way home from the disrupted show, Charles decides to tell him a different kind of story—one about Christ, his compassion, sacrifice, and love.
Charles begins narrating while sitting beside Walter, starting with the birth of Jesus in a manger. The scene shifts to a stable in Jerusalem at night. The three wise men arrive to present their gifts—gold, myrrh, and frankincense. In this moment, the film inserts little Walter into the scene, witnessing the quiet miracle, while Charles watches the story unfold with his son embedded within it. When Herod’s soldiers descend upon the town to kill infants under two years old, Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus flee in haste—now accompanied by both Walter and Charles, who become participants in this urgent escape.
The sequence involves several layers of transgression: across spaces, temporalities, and characters. From Victorian England to Jerusalem two millennia ago, the film forges a direct link between disparate histories and geographies. This leap is made possible through Charles’s movement from narrator to observer to participant, and through Walter’s transformation from listener to emotionally engaged witness. Charles, in his dual role as narrator and father, opens an affective channel by shifting from storyteller to co-observer, turning narrative authority into an empathetic bridge. As he guides Walter into the story of Christ, he also joins him in experiencing its emotional gravity—not as a didactic father, but as a fellow witness.
The Man Who Invented Christmas
The director of The King of Kings, Jang Seong-ho, appears to have made several leaps across spaces, histories, and perspectives in adapting The Life of Our Lord into a story of his own. He seems to have imaginatively placed himself in the position of Charles Dickens—a father writing a story of Jesus Christ for his children. At the same time, he enters the child’s playful and emotionally porous world to restructure the life of Christ from that vantage point.
In one of the film’s final scenes, Walter loses his cat in the midst of Jesus’s final walk carrying the wooden cross. While searching through the emotionally charged crowd, Walter sees Jesus holding the cat, who then momentarily transforms into Walter’s father. This moment blurs personal and sacred space, collapsing paternal protection and the religious theme of sacrificial love into a single emotional event. Jang Seong-ho, in breaking through cultural and narrative boundaries between Dickens’s original and his own background as a Korean filmmaker, creates a story that resonates affectively with contemporary audiences. It is a cinematic retelling that transcends the limits of the original, not through fidelity to the text, but through emotional reinvention.
Such an act of breaking the boundaries—or, to put it differently, combining the story planes of disparate cultural and perspectival frameworks—is not uniquely found in The King of Kings. The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017), a film about the making of A Christmas Carol, transforms Charles Dickens’s library into a space where his fictional characters come to life and converse with him about the story in progress. In the film, Dickens suffers from writer’s block and emotional turbulence, particularly in relation to his estranged father, who had abandoned him during childhood due to imprisonment for debt.
Amidst what Dickens perceives as a culture ruled by greed and self-interest, the fictional world of Scrooge becomes a stage for moral reckoning—where generosity and compassion gradually prevail. Through this fictional mediation, Dickens confronts his unresolved anger and reframes his personal history. It is this joining of disparate elements—fiction and reality, history and imagination—that seems to generate a resonance capable of crossing cultural boundaries. The King of Kings similarly invites its viewers into this affective space of convergence, where storytelling becomes a means of navigating between histories, identities, and emotional truths.