by REERA YOO | @reeraboo
editor@charactermedia.com
Warner Brothers Pictures is planning to create local productions in South Korea, Jun Oh, the studio’s senior vice president of business affairs, told the Hollywood Reporter.
“We are actually very interested in doing local Korean movies,” Oh said on Tuesday during the annual International Content Conference (DICON), which was held this year in Seoul by the South Korean culture ministry. “We want to hit all the demographics and the territories that are big on moviegoing and Korea is a top 10 moviegoing market.”
Domestic films have been outperforming Hollywood titles at the South Korean box office in recent years, according to the Hollywood Reporter. In 2013, local productions collected 59.7 percent of the revenue while Hollywood titles only took 35.5 percent.
“In the last decade the trend has been that U.S. movies have been going down in terms of box office in local markets,” Oh said. “U.S. movies used to take up 60 percent of the market share in Korea, but now Korean movies are dominating.”
Village Roadshow Pictures, a long-time collaborator of Warner Bros., also expressed their interest in producing original content in East Asia. In 2011, the Australian co-producer/co-financier group launched an Asian branch that focuses on Chinese productions. The company bought the rights to the acclaimed 2013 Korean thriller Hide and Seek for a Chinese-language remake just last month.
“Local Korean products have traveled well to Asian countries,” said Michael Lee, the vice president of Village Roadshow. “Korea has such a mature [film culture], with production values that are so high that Korean films will travel well.”
Although the two companies are focusing more on producing local projects in Asia, both executives said they hope that more U.S. remakes of Korean box-office hits will find success.
“My company has done [The Lake House, the U.S. version of Korean melodrama Il Mare] with Keanu Reeves. But only five or six Korean films have been remade so far [in the U.S.], and it isn’t a big sample size. Give it time and it may work out,” said Lee.
Photo courtesy of the L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival
