It’s rare for the right project to come to the right person at the right time, but in the case of “Pachinko,” that’s exactly what happened. Long before Blue Marble Pictures and Blue Marble Management’s founder and CEO Theresa Kang ever picked up Min Jin Lee’s novel, she was poised to help bring this particular story to the screen.
When Kang encountered the 2017 book, she was still working as an agent for WME. “A lot of books get discussed at agencies,” she told TheWrap. “But I remember when I heard about this one, I was like, ‘Wait a minute, Zainichi Koreans in Japan?’”
A saga that tells the story of one family over generations, “Pachinko” revolves around a Korean family who immigrated to Japan before World War II and how they grapple with their identities in a country that’s ceaselessly hostile to them.