Cheese in the Trap, 184 episodes over seven years, revisited ten years after the drama

Soonkki’s Cheese in the Trap (치즈인더트랩) began on Naver Webtoon on July 7, 2010 and posted its final episode on March 30, 2017. It updated every Thursday and ran 184 episodes across four seasons. The protagonist is Hong Seol, a third-year business student. The story starts when she notices that Yoo Jung, the senior everyone describes as handsome, rich, and kind, behaves strangely toward her alone. Everything is seen through Seol’s eyes as she tries to work out what Jung is really thinking, and the slow shift in their relationship gives a romance the texture of a thriller. Naver Webtoon’s own tag for the series is “romance thriller.”

The numbers show the scale. When the Japanese publisher KADOKAWA launched its edition in 2018, it cited more than 1.1 billion cumulative page views worldwide. In Korea, Wisdom House published the print edition by season, with season one in six volumes. KADOKAWA’s full-color Japanese edition runs ten volumes. In 2014 the series was selected for Today’s Korean Comics, an honor given by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. What sits on Naver Webtoon today is a re-serialized version uploaded from the start between December 2018 and December 2019, 312 installments including the preview, epilogue, and afterword. It became a paid title once that re-run finished.

The drama aired on tvN from January 4 to March 1, 2016 as a sixteen-episode Monday-Tuesday series directed by Lee Yoon-jung. Park Hae-jin played Yoo Jung, Kim Go-eun played Hong Seol, Seo Kang-joon played Baek In-ho, Lee Sung-kyung played Baek In-ha, and Nam Joo-hyuk played Kwon Eun-taek. Ratings climbed from 3.6% for the premiere to a peak of 7.1% in episode nine and closed at 6.9% (Nielsen Korea, nationwide). Kim Go-eun won Best New Actress at the 52nd Baeksang Arts Awards for the role. The second half, however, gave Baek In-ho a much larger share of the story and changed the ending, which led to a public dispute between the original author and the production. It is still cited whenever people discuss how webtoon adaptations go wrong.

The film opened on March 14, 2018. Kim Je-young directed, and Park Hae-jin returned as Yoo Jung. Oh Yeon-seo played Hong Seol, Park Ki-woong played Baek In-ho, and Yoo In-young played Baek In-ha. It runs 116 minutes, produced by Mountain Movement Story and distributed by Little Big Pictures. The box office was modest: according to a 2019 report, cumulative admissions were about 229,000. It opened in Japan on July 14 of the same year, where the drama had also aired under the title “Koi wa Cheese in the Trap.”

2026 marks ten years since the drama aired. That does not mean anything new is coming. As of August 2026 there has been no announcement of a remake or further adaptation. Soonkki went on to serialize Fin de Siècle Green Apple Cram School, a school story set in 1999, from December 2020. If the drama’s ending left you puzzled, season four of the webtoon is the place to go: that is exactly where the drama diverged, and the original closes Seol and Jung’s story from Seol’s point of view to the last page. The Korean edition is on Naver Webtoon and the English edition is on WEBTOON. (As of August 21, 2026)