Netflix’s The Scandal has both a movie and a novel in its family tree. When Netflix announced the Korean series in March 2025 under the working title Scandals, it said the project was based on the 2003 film Untold Scandal, which had reimagined a novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in Joseon-era Korea. By August 2026, Netflix was introducing the finished series as director Jung Ji-woo’s reimagining of Laclos’s 1782 novel Dangerous Liaisons. Those descriptions point to a connected adaptation history, not two unrelated origins.
Why Netflix named the film first
The 2025 production announcement is unusually specific about the intermediate step. It calls Untold Scandal the basis for the planned series and identifies the film as a Korean reimagining of Laclos’s work. At that stage, the show still had a working title, Scandals (WT). Netflix also named Son Ye-jin, Ji Chang-wook, and NANA in the announcement.
The film matters here because it makes the Korean setting part of the adaptation lineage. The route Netflix described was not simply a jump from an eighteenth-century European novel to a new television production: its own announcement placed a 2003 Korean film between them. That is a statement about the project’s announced source, though, not a map of which scenes or choices the finished series takes from the film.
Why the novel leads the later pitch
Netflix’s August 2026 release announcement puts Dangerous Liaisons at the front of the story. It calls The Scandal a reimagining of the 1782 novel, identifies Jung Ji-woo as director, and places Lady Cho, Cho Won, and Hui-yeon in Joseon-era Korea. A September trailer announcement again uses the novel as its reference point while describing a wager involving those three characters.
That shift in emphasis is easy to overread. The later announcements do not say the series abandoned Untold Scandal, and the earlier one does not promise a close remake of it. Netflix is giving viewers two ways into the same lineage: the Korean film in the production history and the older novel in the finished show’s public introduction. Neither announcement tells us how faithfully the series follows either predecessor.
For a viewer deciding what to know before pressing play, the useful answer is therefore both, with a distinction. Untold Scandal is the film Netflix explicitly named as the series’ basis when production was announced. Netflix identified the film’s source as a Laclos novel in 2025, using the English title Dangerous Connections; its 2026 introduction of the completed series foregrounded that work as Dangerous Liaisons. You do not need to treat one reference as a correction of the other.
Netflix announced a September 18, 2026 global premiere. On September 30, its U.S. title page listed The Scandal as an eight-episode limited series with English audio and subtitles. The available official material answers the source question clearly enough to orient a new viewer. It leaves the more granular question—which parts of the film or novel survive onscreen—open.
