The digital graveyard is getting a little less crowded. After years of gathering dust on a server somewhere in Seoul, Everyday We Are has finally secured a release date of March 4. It’s a move that feels less like a grand premiere and more like a studio finally deciding to stop paying for the insurance on a totaled car.
Kim Sae Ron, once the industry’s darling, is the engine behind this particular wreck. We all remember the 2022 headlines: the DUI, the crashed transformer, the neighborhood’s lights going dark, and the inevitable, grueling public apology tour that never quite landed. Since then, her career hasn't just been on ice; it’s been deep-frozen. But movies are expensive. Producers don’t just eat the cost of a feature film because the lead actor decided to play bumper cars with public infrastructure. They wait. They wait for the anger to cool, or for the tax write-off to lose its luster, or for a new star to emerge from the wreckage who can carry the marketing weight.
Enter Lee Chae Min.
This film marks his debut, a fact that feels like a cruel cosmic joke. Imagine landing your first major role, putting in the work, and then watching the entire project get buried in the backyard because your co-star had a very bad night behind the wheel. Lee has since moved on to bigger things—Crash Course in Romance, hosting Music Bank—but this film remains his professional birth certificate. It’s been sitting in a vault like a cursed relic. Now, he’s being asked to promote a version of himself that’s years out of date, alongside a ghost.
It’s a classic sunk-cost fallacy in motion. The production team likely spent a few billion won on this high school melodrama. You can’t just delete that from the ledger. So, they’re rolling it out in March, a traditional dumping ground for projects that aren't expected to break the box office. They’re banking on Lee Chae Min’s current popularity to pull the carriage out of the mud, hoping audiences will pay for a ticket to see the "new" guy while ignoring the elephant in the frame.
The friction here isn't just about morality; it’s about the sheer awkwardness of the timeline. In the world of fast-fashion celebrity, two years is an eternity. Kim Sae Ron’s face on a poster in 2024 is a glitch in the simulation. It reminds the public of the 20 million won fine she had to cough up and the images of her working in a cafe that the internet dissected for signs of "sincerity." It’s hard to sell a sweet, nostalgic coming-of-age story when the audience is busy Googling the lead's blood-alcohol content from three summers ago.
For the studio, the trade-off is simple. They release the film, take whatever meager ticket sales they can get, and finally close the book on a PR nightmare. They don’t expect a hit. They expect an exit strategy. It’s a cynical calculation that treats film not as art, but as a depreciating asset that needs to be liquidated before it hits zero.
Lee Chae Min will probably show up to the press calls, smile his practiced idol smile, and answer questions about "working hard" and "learning a lot." He’ll do the heavy lifting for a woman who isn't expected to show her face on a red carpet anytime soon. It’s a heavy burden for a debut role. He’s not just an actor here; he’s a human shield for a balance sheet.
The marketing will try to frame this as a "long-awaited" release. It’s not. It’s a clearance sale. We’re watching the industry perform a post-mortem in real-time, dragging a project out of the basement just to see if there’s any heartbeat left in the brand. It’s a reminder that in the age of digital content, nothing ever truly stays buried—not because of its quality, but because someone, somewhere, still wants their money back.
One has to wonder if Lee Chae Min secretly wishes the hard drive had just caught fire instead.