

The demand is very high for Korean content. As demand for Korean content has gone up in recent years, are you finding costs are going up as well? Or are you simply just being more ambitious because you’ve seen there’s a broad international market for your shows? Very often when it works in Korea, it also gets received pretty well outside Korea. Squid Game was famously produced for a fraction of what a similar-size blockbuster might have cost were it produced in the U.S. We want to bring that to the screen and unleash the creative potential of some of the stories that we’re witnessing from Korea. It’s both going to be invested in increasing the number of titles, but also right-sizing the investment and putting money where the ambition is big.
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What’s the basic plan for how to spend it? Last month you announced you’ll be investing $2.5 billion on content over the next few years, which is dramatically more than your previous budgets. spinoffs, the possibility of K-Christmas movies, and, of course, the status of Squid Game season two. He also talked about the possibility of Netflix Korea reality shows getting U.S. īuffering caught up with Kang a few weeks ago to talk about the company’s decision to double down on original content and what kinds of programs we can expect. Netflix Korea has also expanded into reality TV, garnering global viewing for Physical: 100 and Singles Inferno.
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Most recently, the second batch of episodes from drama The Glory topped the company’s global streaming chart for multiple weeks in March the overall series now stands as the fifth most-popular non-English TV series in Netflix history. A University of Southern California alum whose resume includes a stint working in music licensing, Kang and his team have already scored several follow-up hits post Squid Game. The man in charge of Netflix’s Korean expansion is VP of content Don Kang, who will mark his fifth year at the company this summer. “We have a large base of upcoming shows and films from around the world could probably serve our members better than most,” Sarandos told investors last month. While Netflix is sinking so much cash into Korean programming because it drives viewership and attracts subscribers, the streamer has also made it clear it views its global content pipeline as a resource to help weather a prolonged strike by the Writers Guild of America or other Hollywood labor unions. visit by South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol to announce plans to spend $2.5 billion on K-content during the next four years - more than double the roughly $1.2 billion the company has spent in the country since launching there in 2016. Not surprisingly, Netflix has reacted to Squid Game’s success by putting even more money into content production from the region. “The exciting thing for me would be if the next Stranger Things came from outside America,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told me during some reporting I did in 2018, noting that at the time, “nothing of that scale has ever come from anywhere but Hollywood.” Squid Game ended up doing that, and more: When Stranger Things 4 was released last summer, its first-month viewership - while huge - still couldn’t quite match the record set by the Korean thriller. It also offered convincing proof that Netflix execs had been right when, years earlier, they decided to spend a sizable portion of their multibillion-dollar programming budget on series produced outside the United States and Europe. In addition to amassing more than 1.6 billion viewing hours during its first four weeks - the biggest launch ever for the streamer - the dystopian drama from creator Hwang Dong-hyuk underscored the global appeal of entertainment content made in Korea. It’s been nearly two years since Squid Game debuted on Netflix and became a global phenomenon virtually overnight. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photo: Netflix Netflix’s The Glory, one of the many new shows and movies coming out of the service’s expanded Korea strategy.
