Cho Jin-woong's retirement stranded tvN's Signal 2 — a hundreds-of-billions-won sequel

On 5 December 2025, previously unreported allegations about Cho Jin-woong's past spread through Korean media and online. The next day the actor — one of Korea's most bankable film stars — announced his retirement from acting. tvN's Signal 2, the long-awaited sequel to the 2016 hit and the centrepiece of the channel's 20th-anniversary slate, had wrapped filming in August and was deep in post-production, with Cho in the lead role the sequel was built around.

The first cost was financial. Under the revised standard broadcast contract, a penalty for an actor's breach is double the appearance fee — at roughly 100M won per episode across eight episodes, that put the floor above 1.5B won, and industry sources told Money Today that a claim could reach the 10B-won class. The production itself was reported to have cost hundreds of billions of won, most of it already spent.

The second cost was the show itself. Sources told YTN that replacing Cho was practically impossible: reshoots would cost nearly as much as the original shoot and would not restore the chemistry of the original cast. tvN said it was monitoring the situation and discussing the schedule; as of mid-December no decision had been announced.

Markets priced the uncertainty immediately: Studio Dragon fell 1.54% to 38,350 won on 8 December, and CJ ENM lost about 5% over the week. Signal 2, written by Kim Eun-hee and reuniting the 2016 cast, had been positioned as the flagship of tvN's 20th anniversary — and it sat in post-production with its future undecided.