Since ‘Squid Game’ turned a Korean survival drama into the most-watched title in Netflix history, the streamer’s playbook in Seoul has hardened into a single bet: that Korean genre filmmaking, stacked with recognizable faces, travels further than almost anything Hollywood can manufacture. ‘Paper Man’ is the latest expression of that thesis — a crime thriller assembled less around a concept than around a roster, pairing alumni of ‘Squid Game’ and the Marvel Cinematic Universe under a director whose calling card is the kind of slick, high-grossing crime drama Korean audiences reward.

As Deadline first reported, the now-shooting series — working title ‘Paper Man’ — casts Cho Jung-seok as Cha Myung-jo, a man who manufactures imitation character stickers for a living and stumbles into producing a counterfeit bill so flawless it is indistinguishable from real currency. The forgery drags him into a criminal underworld; at home, he is quietly eclipsed by his far more accomplished wife. It is a premise that folds Korean cinema’s recurring obsessions — money, class, the precarious dignity of the ordinary man — into a single noir engine.

The casting is where the ambition shows. Park Hae-soo, whose Sang-woo anchored the original ‘Squid Game’ before he led the drug-cartel saga ‘Narco-Saints’, plays Oh Seung-eop, first deputy director of the anti-counterfeiting division at the Korea Mint — effectively the hunter to Cho’s hunted. Claudia Kim, who broke through internationally as Dr. Helen Cho in ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ and more recently fronted Netflix’s ‘Gyeongseong Creature’ and ‘The Atypical Family’, takes the pivotal role of Ko Hye-seok, Myung-jo’s wife and an elite judge. Cho Jung-seok, beloved from ‘Hospital Playlist’ and the disaster hit ‘Exit’, supplies the everyman center the whole thing balances on.

Directing is Lee Il-hyung, whose 2016 debut ‘A Violent Prosecutor’ became one of that year’s biggest Korean box-office successes — a pedigree in exactly the procedural-crime register ‘Paper Man’ is reaching for. The project lands in a lane Netflix has been steadily widening, from ‘Narco-Saints’ to ‘Gyeongseong Creature’, wagering that Korea’s deep bench of genre directors and crossover stars can keep generating the watercooler titles its global subscriber base now expects.

‘Paper Man’ has officially entered production, with its title still provisional and a release window yet to be set. No premiere date has been announced.

The conceit is almost too neat for the moment: a story about a forgery so perfect no one can tell it from the real thing, bankrolled by the company that has spent five years proving Korean genre product is the closest thing streaming has to printing money.

Tags: Netflix, casting, Cho Jung-seok, Claudia Kim, Paper Man, Park Hae-soo