Anna: The Ending Explained — And the Fight Over Its Episodes

"Anna" premiered on Coupang Play in June 2022 as a six-episode psychological thriller starring Bae Suzy. It became one of the platform's most talked-about original series — not for its plot alone, but for a fight over how many episodes it was supposed to have.

The show follows a woman who steals a dead acquaintance's identity and can't let it go. That story has a clean ending. The argument between the director who made the show and the platform that aired it did not resolve nearly as cleanly — it ended in a courtroom almost two years later.

A small lie becomes someone else's whole life

Lee Yu-mi grows up poor, the daughter of a con man, watching wealthier classmates live lives she can't afford. When she meets a college acquaintance who goes by "Anna" — real name Lee Hyun-joo — Yu-mi starts borrowing pieces of that identity to get ahead.

One borrowed credential becomes a stolen one, then a stolen name. By the time the series is underway, Yu-mi is living entirely as Anna: a new job, a new family, a marriage to an ambitious man named Ji-hoon (Kim Jun-han) who has political ambitions of his own.

Korean critics described Yu-mi's arc using the term Ripley syndrome — a pop-psychology label, not a clinical diagnosis, borrowed from Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley," for someone who lies so consistently they start to believe the fabricated version of themselves.

How the show actually ends

The real Anna, Lee Hyun-joo, is presumed to have died by suicide early in the story. Yu-mi never fully accepts this — and in the finale it's revealed Hyun-joo didn't take her own life. Ji-hoon killed her, to keep Yu-mi's fraud, and his own reputation, from being exposed.

Yu-mi's biological mother is dying in the meantime, but Ji-hoon blocks her from visiting; she learns of the death mid-flight. Ji-hoon later wins an election for Seoul mayor, and the couple boards a flight to the United States, ostensibly to collect his son from a trip.

His real plan, revealed to Yu-mi during the drive, is to have her committed to a psychiatric facility in the US rather than let her return to Korea.

The desert crash that ends the marriage

Swerving to avoid a deer, Ji-hoon crashes the car; Yu-mi pulls the handbrake, sending it into a pole. She escapes the wreck. He's trapped inside it.

Using her scarf and a lighter, she sets the car on fire and leaves him to die. The final scene shows her walking alone through the desert, eventually settling into a small, snowbound cottage in Canada.

Reviewers have called it a bittersweet ending rather than a happy one: Yu-mi survives and escapes Ji-hoon, but loses the borrowed life she spent the whole series protecting, trading it for isolation.

Why an eight-episode file matters more than it sounds

None of that plot changed between versions. What changed was how much of it, and whose intentions, reached viewers first — and that's the part international audiences searching "Anna ending" usually miss entirely.

Coupang Play is the streaming arm of Coupang, the e-commerce company often described as South Korea's Amazon. Its OTT (over-the-top) platform competes with Netflix Korea, Disney+ and Tving for original Korean drama, and "Anna" was one of its highest-profile commissions to date.

Writer-director Lee Joo-young, previously known for the 2017 film "Single Rider," said the version she shot and delivered was eight episodes, each running 45 to 61 minutes. What aired on June 24, 2022, was six.

A platform re-edit the director says she never approved

On August 2, 2022, Lee's attorneys announced that Coupang Play had re-cut "Anna" through a different editing team, without her consent, after approving her rough cut through episode four without major notes. She said the shorter version damaged not just runtime but the story's structure.

The show's editing director, Kim Jung-hoon, backed her account publicly the next day, saying the broadcast version "was not the drama the director and I worked sleepless nights creating."

Coupang Play didn't deny re-editing the show. It said Lee's cut had drifted from what both sides had agreed on, that it had requested revisions that went unaddressed, and that it re-edited — with the production company's consent — for a more general audience.

The industry backed the director, and Coupang released her cut anyway

On August 11, the Directors Guild of Korea, a trade association representing film and TV directors, issued a statement supporting Lee. Six crew members who had worked on the shoot said they backed her position too.

Coupang Play responded on August 12 by releasing Lee's original eight-episode cut alongside the broadcast version, saying it was doing so "out of respect for the director's editorial direction." Both versions stayed available, and comparing them became part of how the show was watched.

• Six-episode broadcast version: 7.8 out of 10 on MyDramaList
• Eight-episode director's cut: 8.0 out of 10 on MyDramaList

When critics compared the two side by side, reaction was mixed. Several noted the longer cut added character motivation, but that both versions told largely the same story in broad strokes.

An apology that lasted about a day

On August 19 and 21, the Directors Guild mediated a private meeting between Lee's side and Coupang Play. Her attorneys announced afterward that a senior Coupang Play executive had personally apologized and agreed to remove Lee's name and six crew members' names from the six-episode version's credits.

Coupang Play disputed that account almost immediately. A day later, it said no apology had been made and that Lee had actually acknowledged during the meeting that no unauthorized re-edit occurred — a claim her side called false. Lee's attorneys said they would pursue defamation charges over the denial.

Why the courts sided with the platform, not the director

The dispute eventually moved into civil court, where Lee sued Coupang and the production company for violating what Korean copyright law calls the right of integrity — a creator's right to stop alterations that damage a work's essential character.

On February 14, 2024, the Seoul Central District Court ruled against her. The court found that Lee's directing contract was with the production company, which had in turn contracted with Coupang, and that final editorial authority had passed to Coupang through that chain.

The court also classified "Anna" as a jointly authored work rather than Lee's individual creation, and ruled she hadn't given Coupang adequate time or materials to weigh in on her edit before objecting to its changes. An appeals court later upheld the ruling.

What the fight never fully settled

Whether Lee's and her six colleagues' names were actually removed from the six-episode version's credits, as promised in the disputed August 2022 meeting, isn't confirmed in any account of the case since. Nor is the outcome of the defamation complaint her side threatened over Coupang's denial.

Two versions of "Anna" still exist and are rated separately by viewers, regardless of what a Korean court decided about who had the legal right to make that decision.

One unplanned side effect is easier to pin down: after "Anna" premiered, sales of its source novel, Jeong Han-ah's "Intimate Stranger," reportedly jumped more than sevenfold in a single week — a rare concrete number from a dispute otherwise built on competing claims.

Timeline of the "Anna" editing dispute

Frequently asked

How many episodes does Anna have?

Coupang Play broadcast six episodes on June 24, 2022, but director Lee Joo-young says she delivered eight; both versions were eventually released for viewers to compare.

How does Anna end?

Yu-mi sets her husband Ji-hoon's crashed car on fire after he tries to have her committed, then walks off alone to a snowbound cottage in Canada — a bittersweet rather than happy ending.

Who won the Anna director's cut lawsuit?

The Seoul Central District Court ruled against director Lee Joo-young on February 14, 2024, finding Coupang held final editorial authority through its contract chain; an appeals court later upheld the decision.