On November 18, Warner Bros' Senior Vice President of business affairs Jun Oh spoke at the International Content Conference (DICON). He stated, "We are actually very interested in doing local Korean movies."
Warner Bros is not the first to try their hand at making local Korean productions. Fox launched 'Running Man' last year and recently released 'Slow Video'; both movies gained over a million viewers. Warner Bros thinks it can do better, however, as Oh boldly stated, "Warner Brothers is bigger than Fox in terms of local productions and produces works in Germany, Italy and Japan. Now we're eyeing China and Korea."
Warner Bros calls itself a "trend-conscious" company and it believes that Korea is where the trends are happening. Although U.S. movies used to make up 60 percent of the movie market share in Korea, Korean movies have now taken over the majority share. Warner Bros wants to keep up with this change of pace as Korea is regarded as a global top 10 movie market.
Warner Bros also hopes to remake some popular Korean films. You might be having some negative thoughts at this prospect as movies such as Spike Lee's 'Oldboy' have bombed at the box office. However, Jun Oh asks fans to give the idea a chance as as he states, "[...] 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."
Perhaps, Warner Bros is the best Hollywood studio to take this on as they were the first to hire an Asian American CEO in Kevin Tsujihara. What do you guys think? Is this a welcome trend, or something to dread?
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