A Millionaire’s First Love
🎬 Viu
⭐ 7.2 IMDb
🔞 12+
🎬 Film Overview
FIRST LOVE MELODRAMA PICK
Kang Jae-kyung has spent eighteen years never once hearing the word no. Sports cars, VIP tables, a credit line nobody questions — his birthday is supposed to hand him the rest of his grandfather’s fortune, no strings attached. Except there is a string, and it’s absurd: to actually collect, he has to transfer to and graduate from a public high school buried in the mountains of Gangwon Province, hours from anyone who knows his name.
What follows isn’t the fish-out-of-water comedy the setup promises, or not only that. Jae-kyung’s plan to get expelled as fast as possible runs straight into Choi Eun-hwan, a classmate who has survived actual hardship and isn’t remotely impressed by his tantrums. Their standoffs turn into something neither of them saw coming, and Kim Tae-kyun’s film spends its runtime asking a genuinely good question for a rich-boy melodrama: what’s actually left of Jae-kyung once nobody cares about his money?
⚡ Quick Verdict
One box. Everything you need to decide.
· IMDb
▶ Official Trailer
🎭 Cast & Characters
The cast that turns a rich-boy fish-out-of-water setup into something worth sitting with.
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📖 The Story
No spoilers — just enough to know if this is your film.
Kang Jae-kyung has never once had to want for anything. Sports cars, VIP tables, a credit line that doesn’t ask questions — his eighteenth birthday is supposed to hand him the rest of it, the family fortune that comes with simply being his grandfather’s only heir. He treats the people around him the way he treats everything else: as accessories to a life he’s already decided he deserves.
Then the will is read, and it comes with a catch nobody saw coming. To actually collect his inheritance, Jae-kyung has to transfer to and graduate from a public high school — not in Seoul, but tucked into the mountains of Gangwon Province, hours from anything he recognizes as his life. No driver, no allowance, no entourage. Just a duffel bag and a bus ticket to a town that has never heard of him.
He arrives determined to get expelled as fast as possible, treating his new classmates with the same contempt he’d bring to hired help. It doesn’t land the way he expects. The kids here have grown up around real hardship, and Jae-kyung’s tantrums read less like rebellion and more like a boy who’s never had to actually deal with a problem himself.
Choi Eun-hwan is the first person at the school who refuses to be impressed or intimidated by him. She’s sharp, unbothered by his money, and has clearly survived worse than a rich kid’s bad attitude — which makes her the one person in Gangwon he can’t simply outlast or ignore.
Their standoffs turn into something else almost without either of them noticing — a walk home that runs too long, a joke that actually lands, the first conversation Jae-kyung has had in years where nobody wants anything from him. The film’s early comic beats about a rich kid failing at farm chores start giving way to something quieter and more sincere.
What Jae-kyung starts to notice, slowly, is how much of his old identity was borrowed from his bank account. Stripped of the money, he has to figure out who he actually is when nobody’s impressed by his name — and Eun-hwan, without trying to teach him anything, becomes the reason he wants to find out.
But Eun-hwan is carrying something she hasn’t told him, a private weight that occasionally surfaces in the moments she pulls away for no reason he can name. Jae-kyung is too busy falling for her to notice the pattern — and the film lets that quiet unease build under the romance long before it ever explains itself.
🏁 Ending Explained
Full spoilers ahead — what happens, what it means, and what it all adds up to.
Full Spoilers Ahead — This section covers the complete ending of A Millionaire’s First Love. Stop here if you haven’t watched.
The reveal Eun-hwan’s disappearances finally get an explanation: she has a heart condition that’s been with her since childhood, and it’s serious enough that her time is running out. Her one unfulfilled wish is to build an orphanage on a stretch of land that happens to belong to Jae-kyung’s family — a coincidence that turns out not to be a coincidence at all.
The sacrifice Jae-kyung’s answer is to walk away from almost everything. Rather than fight to keep the full inheritance, he accepts the sliver his grandfather’s will allows him without meeting the school condition — 0.1% of the fortune — and uses it to buy Eun-hwan the land outright.
What it means This is the moment that recontextualizes the whole film’s central obstacle course. The grandfather’s condition was never really about a diploma — it was a stress test, built to strip Jae-kyung of every prop he’d used to avoid becoming a person. Giving up the fortune isn’t Jae-kyung losing the game; it’s the only way he could have actually won it.
The open question What the film doesn’t spell out is what happens to Eun-hwan next. Her illness is presented as advanced and unpredictable, and the ending stops short of confirming how much time she has left. That’s a deliberate choice — the story is more interested in what Jae-kyung is willing to give than in delivering a tidy medical outcome.
The KDW verdict Read the whole film again with the ending in mind and Jae-kyung’s early tantrums stop looking like a spoiled kid’s meltdown and start looking like a boy already being nudged toward the one thing his grandfather actually wanted him to learn. The will wasn’t cruel. It was the only lesson plan a rich man could leave behind for a grandson who’d never had to earn anything.
✍️ KDramaWorlds Editor’s Take
Our honest read on why this film is worth your time — and who it’s for.
Kim Tae-kyun
Known for: Kim Tae-kyun built his reputation blending youthful romance with heavier emotional stakes, and A Millionaire’s First Love is an early, formative example of the approach — pairing a broad, comic setup with a melodrama willing to sit in genuine grief by its final act.
Watching A Millionaire’s First Love in 2026 is a strange kind of time capsule, mostly because of who’s in it. Hyun Bin plays entitled and unbearable so convincingly in the first act that it’s almost funny to remember this is the actor who’d eventually anchor Crash Landing on You — his Jae-kyung sulks and postures in a way that makes the back half of the film’s transformation land harder than a lot of 2006 melodrama earns. It’s the same kind of long-odds, era-crossing devotion that makes Ditto work nearly two decades later — Korean film keeps returning to the idea that love has to survive an impossible gap before it counts.
Lee Yeon-hee has the harder job and gets less credit for it. Eun-hwan could easily have been written as a saint whose only function is to fix a rich boy — instead she spends most of the film refusing to be charmed, which is exactly what keeps the romance from curdling into class-tourism. The film never actually argues that poverty is romantic, only that Jae-kyung’s money was never the thing standing between him and a real life. That’s a sharper point than most inheritance dramas bother making — The Impossible Heir mines similar territory nearly two decades later, minus the terminal illness.
Nearly twenty years on, the film’s soft-focus rural cinematography and unhurried pacing feel almost radical next to how fast modern K-dramas move through the same beats. It takes its time getting Jae-kyung to actually change, which is why the ending doesn’t feel like a twist so much as a payoff that’s been quietly building since the bus ride into Gangwon Province.
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