Asian movies target overseas markets
South Korea rides on the success of Parasite at this year’s Oscars
South Korean films are making their mark on world cinema following the landmark success of the Oscarwinning movie Parasite. Shattering records, the black comedythriller has catapulted the nation’s film industry to global recognition.
The movie won four Oscars at this year’s Academy Awards, including Best International Feature Film and Best Picture. It was the first non-English-language film to win the latter category in the awards’ 92-year history.
As of mid-March, before the novel coronavirus pandemic took hold around the world, the movie had topped $254 million in global ticket sales, with nearly 80 percent of the takings coming from overseas markets, according to Box Office Mojo, a film revenue tracker based in the United States.
Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park, assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong, said South Korean films can no longer be labeled “ethnocentric cinema”. Neither can they be described as being situated on the fringes of world cinema.
“It (the South Korean film industry) now defines world cinema,” he said, adding that the globalization of Korean culture has arrived and “it looks as if the momentum will continue to expand”.
The history of film in what is now South Korea dates to 1919 — a century before the appearance of Parasite — although the industry only started to boom in the 1990s.
Magnan-Park said this boom can be attributed largely to the introduction of the Sunshine Policy in 1998, which transformed the political landscape on the Korean Peninsula in the pursuit of mutual coexistence with enhanced economic cooperation.
“The political and economic aspects of the Sunshine Policy also had a cultural dimension within South Korea,” MagnanPark said. This has led to loosened government censorship over the arts, reversal of a ban on Japanese cultural products and “allowed coverage of South Korea’s painful and often shameful past to be addressed in an open and honest manner,” he added.
In 1999, Shiri, an action film by South Korean director Kang Je-gyu, became the country’s first Hollywood-style blockbuster. It made international headlines by beating the epic romance and disaster film Titanic on home turf, with ticket sales reaching 6.5 million.
The movie marked the emergence of
South Korean films as attractions for both domestic and global audiences, MagnanPark said. He added that other key factors included Korean narratives featuring Hollywood-style special effects and action scenes, along with the “sensibilities and aesthetics of European art cinema”.
Significant contribution
South Korea is the world’s fifth-largest film market in terms of box office admissions, according to The Korea Herald, citing data from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics.
Last year, box office revenue for films made in the country reached $823 million, up from $203 million 15 years earlier, according to the consultancy Statista. While modest compared with the $11.3 billion movie industry in the United States, it is nonetheless a significant contribution to the global film landscape.
The domestic market share of films made in South Korea in 2018 was 51 percent, based on admissions, according to the Korea Film Council. Meanwhile, 603
South Korean films were exported that year, with a total value of $41.6 million.
Yu Wanying, senior researcher at the Sungkyun Institute of China Studies, or SICS, at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, said, “With a bigger market share in the domestic market, the influence and popularity of the country’s films can even equal those made in Hollywood.”
South Korean movies have long had a huge impact in Asia, pioneering the thirdgeneration of hallyu or the Korean Wave — the rise in global popularity of South Korean culture. The first-generation of
hallyu is often considered to be led by dramas and the second by K-pop.
Yu said, “Behind the success of Parasite is the huge amount of investment poured by the South Korean government into developing and promoting hallyu, including all kinds of preparations made for its globalization.”
In a budget plan released in December, the South Korean authorities allotted a record-high 6.48 trillion won ($5.3 billion) to the culture ministry for this year to promote the country’s promising content industry, according to Yonhap News Agency.
With a larger presence in the global market, South Korean films, through interaction with the country’s drama, beauty, pop music and food markets, will be a key element in the nation’s cultural strategy, Yu said.
In particular, Yu said that while many South Korean films take a deep look at social issues, they are not that hard for foreign viewers to understand, and thus become widely accepted. Productions such as the action horror movie Train to
Busan have provided international audiences with a new taste of the country’s movies.
Cai Gongming, president of the Beijing film company Road Pictures, said Parasite’s success in the global film industry, which has been largely dominated by the West, will give confidence to the industry in China and the rest of Asia.
The movie’s achievements at the Oscars showed that “international audiences can actually accept things not considered as mainstream in Western culture”, Cai said.
In China, the majority of domestic films tend to focus more on the home market, due to its size, Cai said. He added that unlike the way in which South Korea pushes its commercial movies, Chinese filmmakers can explore international opportunities through literary films, which have always been popular with overseas audiences.
Cai also sees opportunities for collaboration between the film industry in both countries. “China and South Korea have cooperated widely in the movie industry, including post-production or through South Korean celebrities featuring in Chinese films,” he said.
Yu, from SICS, said deeper cooperation and communication between the Chinese and South Korean film industries should be promoted further to jointly explore other markets.
With the success of Parasite increasing international demand for Asian films, Yu said this will provide opportunities for the region’s movie industries to use their mutual strengths to achieve better results.
However, Magnan-Park, from the University of Hong Kong, sees challenges for South Korean films. He said there will be a natural rush to replicate the success of director Bong Joon-ho’s quadruple sweep at the Oscars with Parasite, especially through “whitewashing” — the intentional replacement of non-white characters with white actors.
“For South Korean cinema to expand its global reach, especially across Englishspeaking nations, it needs to gain mainstream distribution and exhibition opportunities in markets that are reluctant to devote time and energy to foreign films with subtitles,” Magnan-Park said.
He added that streaming platforms such as Netflix can offer an alternative route for South Korean films to be distributed and shown globally.
Cai, whose company imported the Japanese film Shoplifters to China, said it will consider buying more South Korean movies, if market conditions allow.
Shoplifters, which in 2018 won the Palme d’Or, the top honor at the Cannes Film Festival, is the highest-grossing live-action Japanese film to hit the Chinese mainland.
Cai said Road Pictures paid close attention to Parasite and was interested in bringing the film to the mainland, but in the end, the company did not strike a deal.
“We have been in close contact with different institutions in South Korea, including major filmmakers and industry bodies,” Cai said, adding that he looks forward to other opportunities for cooperation, such as co-productions and remakes.
Noting the impact that the pandemic has had on the global movie industry, Cai said that as film production in the US and Europe has largely been suspended, there could be new opportunities in the second half of this year or the first half of next to fill the gap caused by a lack of movies.
Magnan-Park said, “Once the international medical emergency is over, filmmakers will restart stalled projects and find inspiration to make more compelling movies, including those focusing on COVID-19.”