The Last 《타짜》 Is Named After a Bet Between Two Devils. The Loser Turned Into a Fly.

The fourth film in Korea's card-sharp series opens on Wednesday 23 September, the day before the Chuseok holiday begins, with a title that needs explaining: 《타짜: 벨제붑의 노래》 — Tazza: The Song of Beelzebub.

Here is the director, 최국희, at the press conference on 18 August:

"포커 카드의 스페이드에는 악마의 이름이 붙여져 있는데 스페이드 A는 루시퍼고 스페이드 2는 벨제붑. 루시퍼와 벨제붑의 모든 것을 걸고 승부를 낸다는 이야기에서 제목을 따왔다."

"The spades in a poker deck carry demons' names — the ace of spades is Lucifer, the two of spades is Beelzebub. The title comes from the story of Lucifer and Beelzebub staking everything on a single contest."

The distributor's official synopsis goes further: medieval European clergy regarded cards as the devil's instrument, hearts stood for lust, diamonds for greed, clubs for violence, and each of the thirteen spades — the suit of death — bore a demon's name, with the ace for the fallen angel and the two for hell's incumbent ruler.

It is a wonderful piece of lore. We could not find it anywhere except in this film and its source comic.

We checked, because it sounded too good

We searched in English and Korean for any card-history or occult tradition assigning Lucifer to the ace of spades and Beelzebub to the two, including the exact Korean phrase. We read the standard accounts of playing-card symbolism. The real history is that clergy did denounce cards — "the devil's picture-book" is in print from 1729 — but the traditional reading of the four suits is the four estates of medieval society, not four sins, and no demon roster for the spades appears in any source we could reach.

So the lore is the film's, or the comic's. That is not a strike against it. But it should be attributed, not repeated as fact, and English-language coverage has been repeating it.

What is in the source — 김세영 and 허영만's manhwa, part four — is the bet itself, and it is better than the lore. Two devils gamble everything on one hand. Beelzebub loses and is turned into a 똥파리 — a dung fly. 노재원, who plays 박태영, explained at the same press event that his character tells this story in the film, and the plot proceeds from it. In the comic, 박태영 is called Lucifer throughout, and the two leads are framed as the two demons.

The title is not about card trivia. It is about which of two friends ends up the fly.

The comic always meant to leave the flower cards behind

《타짜》 the manhwa ran in 스포츠조선 from 1999 to 2003, forty-one volumes, written by 김세영 and drawn by 허영만. It is in four parts, and each part is a different game:

Part	Title	Game	Film
1	지리산 작두	섰다, 도리짓고땡 (flower cards)	2006
2	신의 손	고스톱 (flower cards)	2014
3	원 아이드 잭	poker	2019
4	벨제붑의 노래	casino — poker, blackjack, baccarat, sports betting, online	2026

Which settles a complaint that has followed the series since 2019: that Tazza abandoned 화투, the Korean flower cards that made the original what it was, for Western poker. It did — but the comic did it first, by design, twenty years ago. Part four is set across the world, mostly America in its later stretches, and its games are the casino floor. A Korean film about hold'em with a yakuza-backed company and Vietnamese locations is not a betrayal of the source. It is the source.

What actually happened to the 2019 film

The received version is that 《타짜: 원 아이드 잭》 had the series' best opening day and then fell off a cliff. The KOBIS record says something more interesting.

It opened on 11 September 2019 to 332,290 admissions, number one, on 1,345 screens — the strongest opening in the series. On the second day, the eve of Chuseok, it did 353,878 — more than its opening day. It did not collapse. What happened is that 《나쁜 녀석들: 더 무비》 did 442,565 the same day and took number one, and Tazza never got it back. It held through the holiday, faded through October, and finished the year at 2,229,239, sixteenth in the 2019 table.

The critics' post-mortem is the useful part. 박평식 gave it 4 out of 10 — "상투성에 올인," all-in on cliché. 이용철: "첫째가 너무 뛰어나면 둘째, 셋째는 괴로울 수밖에" — when the first-born is that good, the second and third are bound to suffer. And the sharpest, from 오세준: it merely swapped flower cards for poker and "타짜1을 그대로 답습한다" — copied the first film wholesale — with its characters so unbalanced that the whole thing became a vehicle for one supporting role. A 2026 look-back in 한국일보 boils it down to two words: miscasting, and repetition.

So the brief for the fourth film was not "bring back the flower cards." It was "stop remaking the first one."

What this one is doing differently

The mentor is a new man. 조우진 appears in a special role as 곽동욱, a legendary tazza who teaches 장태영. That is not 곽철용 — the 2006 character whose lines became a meme after the 2019 film reminded everyone of them — and 조우진 was not in the 2019 film at all. In the comic the mentor is called 장동욱; the film renamed him, and no one has said why, so we will not guess. The cleaner observation is 씨네플레이's: in 변요한 and 조우진 there is "고니와 평경장의 향기" — the scent of the original's apprentice and master.

Two leads, two devils. 변요한 is 장태영; 노재원 is 박태영. The tagline on the collaboration poster, which pairs 허영만's drawing with the film's image: "가장 믿었던 친구가 가장 잔혹한 패가 되었다" — the friend you trusted most became the cruellest hand. 미요시 아야카 is 가네코, head of a company with yakuza money behind it; 이하라 츠요시, 홍다오, 윤경호, 임세미 and the rapper 스윙스 round out a cast that plays in three languages.

They learned to play. 노재원's own account: "변요한 선배와 함께 자나 깨나 칩을 손에서 놓지 않고 연습했다" — awake or asleep, the chips never left our hands. A professional player, 라드팍, coached; 홍진호 advised. The report that 변요한 did every hand without a hand-double is a second-hand claim in the trade press and we treat it as one. Filming ran from late September 2025 to a 27 January 2026 wrap in Vietnam.

It is 129 minutes and rated 19+, which matters for the next section.

"추석엔 타짜"

Every Tazza film has opened in the run-up to Chuseok. That is not a coincidence, and the director says so plainly:

"전통적으로 계속 추석에 개봉했고 '추석엔 타짜'라는 인식이 있는 것 같다. 추석에 개봉하려고 시간을 역산해서 준비했다."

"Traditionally they've always opened at Chuseok, and there seems to be a sense that Chuseok means Tazza. We worked the schedule backwards to open at Chuseok."

Film	Opened	Chuseok that year	Gap
《타짜》	28 Sept 2006	6 Oct	8 days
《타짜: 신의 손》	3 Sept 2014	8 Sept	5 days
《타짜: 원 아이드 잭》	11 Sept 2019	13 Sept	2 days
《타짜: 벨제붑의 노래》	23 Sept 2026	25 Sept	2 days

The gap has closed from eight days to two. This one opens the day before the holiday span begins.

There is a tension in that strategy, and 경향's 이다원 named it: a 19+ rating at Chuseok cuts out the family audience the holiday is built on, hold'em's rules are a barrier to the casual viewer that 고스톱 never was, and the female roles are thin. All four Tazza films have been 19+; all four have opened at Chuseok; the series' own tradition is to bet against the holiday's demographics and win on the adults who go anyway.

허영만, who wanted this one

The artist has been unusually present. At the press conference the director recalled their first meeting, and 허영만's opening question to him: "이렇게 좋은 만화가 왜 제작이 안 되고 있지" — why has such a good comic not been made? On 라디오스타 in July 2025 he called part four "시리즈 중 드라마가 가장 강하다" — the strongest drama of the series — and said his wish was for Tazza to keep going after this one "like the 007 series."

Which cuts against the studio's line that this is the finale. We are reporting both.

The reviews so far, and the bookings

The press screening was on 9 September. 씨네플레이's three critics gave it three stars, three-and-a-half, and three; 성찬얼's line — "더럽고 비겁하고 시대랑 안 맞는 시리즈다운 뚝심" — dirty, cowardly, out of step with the times, and stubbornly true to the series — is as close to a verdict as the room produced. ELLE found the hold'em repetitive and 가네코's turn unmotivated. 일간스포츠 called 변요한 "최고의 패" — the best hand — and found 스윙스 overplayed. Nobody has called it a return to 2006. Nobody has called it 2019 either.

On the KOBIS reservation board on Sunday afternoon it sat fourth, on 11.0 per cent and 49,379 tickets — behind 《오디세이》, 《암살자(들)》 and 《인턴》, and nine days out. No budget or break-even has been published; we searched three times in Korean and found nothing on the record, so the first weekend will have no target to be measured against except the last film's.

Whether it is the last one depends on whether the man who drew it gets his 007.

Update, 28 September. It opened second and stayed second all holiday — 103,361 on Wednesday, 143,957 on Thursday, then 181,736, 214,885 and 169,894 across the Chuseok weekend, behind 《암살자(들)》 every day — and then, on Monday the 28th, with the holiday over, it was the most-watched film in Korea for the first time: 68,913 to 67,406 for 《암살자(들)》, a margin of about fifteen hundred. It closed the holiday on 901,929 admissions, with a million a few weekdays away. Full table in the collision piece.

Update, 1 October. It passed one million admissions on Wednesday 30 September, its eighth day — 1,015,906 by KOBIS's count — on the same day another film from the same distributor, CJ ENM, opened at number one: a Japanese cartoon.

For the date it opens into — three Korean films on one day — see the September collision. For the other big film of the week, 《인턴》's opening.

Images. The lead photograph is 변요한 at a fan signing in Myeongdong on 27 October 2018, by the Commons user Explicit, CC BY-SA 4.0 — a genuine camera photograph (Nikon D5600, full EXIF), cropped by us and re-shared under the same licence. It is eight years old, and we say so rather than pretend otherwise: it is the most recent freely licensed photograph of the film's lead that exists, and a face is better than no face. The second photograph is 미요시 아야카 on the red carpet of the Tokyo International Film Festival, 23 October 2023, by Dick Thomas Johnson, CC BY 2.0 — verified at the Flickr source as well as on Commons, Sony EXIF, cropped by us. She plays 가네코, the yakuza-backed heiress, and hers is the only other cast photograph that clears our size and licence bar: 조우진's and 노재원's best free images are sub-1200-pixel video frames, and the director has none. The ace and two of spades are CC0, from Dmitry Fomin's English-pattern deck, and they are the title. No stills: the posters and stills are CJ ENM's, and publication is not permission. 허영만's only freely licensed photograph is 157 pixels wide.

Sources. The director's and cast's words are from the 18 August 제작보고회 as reported by 시사위크 and 주간한국, and from OSEN; the distributor's spade lore is from CJ ENM's official synopsis via OSEN. The manhwa's structure is from Korean Wikipedia and 나무위키, cross-checked against 씨네21's 2002 preview of part four. All admissions and dates are from KOBIS directly — the 2019 daily table for 11 and 12 September, the 2019 yearly table, and the film records for all four instalments. The 2019 post-mortems are 씨네21's critic ratings, 오세준 in CoAR (12 September 2019) and 한국일보 (2 September 2026). 허영만's 라디오스타 remarks are from the 9 July 2025 broadcast as reported. Reviews are 씨네플레이, ELLE, 뉴스컬처, 맥스무비, 일간스포츠 and 경향, 9–13 September. Craft details are from 일간스포츠 and 주간한국.

Stated rather than smoothed. The spade-demon lore is attributed to the film and comic, because three searches and the standard card-history sources turned up nothing older. 허영만's "why hasn't this been made" is his words as recalled by the director, not a direct quote from him. The "no hand-double" claim is trade-press hearsay and is labelled so. 나무위키 says the comic's subtitle nods to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" — "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me" — which would be lovely, and which we could not confirm anywhere else, so it lives in this note and not in the piece. The 2019 lifetime total may sit a few dozen admissions above the 2,229,239 year-end figure once 2020 stragglers are counted. And we have not said who played 곽철용 in 2006, because we did not open a page that told us.