Uprising press conference at Busan International Film Festival

BUSAN 2024: Should Asia’s Content Biz Consider Policy To Respond To Inflation, Monopoly & AI?

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The outdoor billboards towering over the streets of Centum City during this year’s Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) said it all. One was for the second season of Netflix’s Hellbound and the other for Disney’s Gangnam B-Side, both of which were premiering in BIFF’s On Screen section. The lack of big billboards for any other content suggested that the only companies with money to splash on outdoor advertising these days are global streamers.

BIFF, which wraps tonight, along with its industry platform Asian Contents and Film Market (ACFM), is the biggest film event in Asia, and has also embraced streaming with the On Screen section, premiering series, and the Asia Contents Awards, recognising content made for OTT platforms.

But while the festival has moved with the times, it has a reputation for supporting indie and arthouse films, as well as the theatrical ecosystem, so eyebrows were raised this year when it chose Uprising, a Netflix-funded production, as the opening film.

Not surprisingly for an event attended by cineastes and filmmakers, much of the chatter at the festival was about the selection of this film, which won’t be screening in theatres, at a time when Korean box office, once the fourth biggest in the world, continues to struggle. Although there have been a few hits this year, including The Roundup: Punishment, Exhuma and most recently I, The Executioner, Korean box office is still only at 60% of pre-pandemic levels.

But the issues facing the Korean and wider Asian content industries go way beyond whether a film should play in cinemas or not. There are much bigger challenges connected to the way that the global tech and content industries are evolving – and how governments around the world are responding to these changes.

Which brings us back to Netflix. The streamer had a large presence at the festival. It held a series of junkets for Uprising (press conference pictured above) and two other series premiering in the On Screen section (Taiwan’s Born For The Spotlight and Japan’s Beyond Goodbye); hosted an evening event to showcase its upcoming Korean films slate; and also held a one-day ‘Creative Asia Forum’, featuring a series of panels with Asian filmmakers in conversation with Netflix executives.

Local studio CJ ENM also held an event to announce that it plans to invest $750m per year in content, which should bring some cheer to the local industry, but it seemed almost like a defensive move. Last year, Netflix announced that it was spending $2.5bn on Korean content over four years, which works out to $625m a year, so was CJ sending a message that it can outspend Netflix? When a vertically integrated Korean studio, that in pre-pandemic times was accused of monopolising the local industry, starts to look defensive, you know the landscape has changed considerably.

Outside of the forums and press events, one of the hot topics of conversation in the industry was soaring production costs… 

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