Park Seo-joon’s Prince Yan: The Korean Superstar’s New Character-Poster Reveal from ‘The Marvels’ Stokes Excitement

On October 15, Marvel Studios unveiled new character posters from their much-looked-forward-to film The Marvels, coloring people’s excitement and perhaps a little over courtesy of the fresh image of Park Seo-joon’s Prince Yan. Park makes his Hollywood debut with the movie, traversing into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, becoming the third Korean actor to do so following Kim Soo-hyun, aka Claudia Kim, in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) as Dr. Helen Cho and Ma Dong-seok, aka Don Lee, in Eternals (2021) as Gilgamesh.

One of the contemporary A-list Korean actors, Park is a “Blue Chip of Chungmuro“—a solid resource in Korean cinema—who has to his credit excellence through invariably perfecting his characters. His Prince Yan is indeed a fantastic character in The Marvels, reckons director Nia DaCosta and his equation with Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) will be intriguing, courtesy of a Chosun Ilbo post. That, I think, is barely any of what will be laid out when the movie opens on November 10th.

Prince Yan’s storyline in the Marvel comics goes like this: Yan reigned over Aladna. When he was young, Lila Cheney—who rose to fame on Earth as a musician after playing often with the band Cats Laughing—came to Aladna for a visit. Yan and Lila got engaged as an effect of Aladna adhering to the custom that only women could choose their partners. And then Lila left being gone for a long.

Even when Lila returned to Aldana years later with no plans of marrying Yan or vice versa, the royal household recalled their engagement. Meanwhile, Carol Danvers stopped by to see Aladna, and Yan urged her to oppose the marriage on his behalf. Marlo, a malevolent alien bent on annexing the region, also arrived to take on Lila and marry Yan. Carol put up a fight for Lila to prevail; her victory gave Yan the right to choose his spouse.

In The Marvels, the scope of Yan or the specifics of his role are still unclear. The film follows Carol exacting revenge on the Supreme Intelligence and regaining herself from the Kree (a high-tech military blue-skinned repressive kind hailing from planet Hala). She must still shoulder a chaotic universe—the strains imposed by unforeseen repercussions.

When obligations fling her into a vortex, her skills entwine with those of Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani). The three subsequently band together to unfold why they are exchanging places when employing powers. The story will zero in more on the complex dynamics of Larson’s character, as she said earlier on Good Morning America. “The first one was the origin story of who she is. Now it’s digging into some more of the complexities, that there’s much more to her than that.”

Back to Park’s role, he is manifestly one of the enticements, notably to K-content fans like mine, injecting more intrigue into the magnum opus’s existing unique cast and lending his worldwide fame and repertoire an additional edge. 2023 per se has been an exciting one for him professionally. Following a standout role in the highly rated sports comedy-drama Dream, he starred in the disaster thriller Concrete Utopia, currently the third-highest-grossing Korean film of 2023 and the South Korean entry at the 96th Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category, ahead of The Marvels.