What is the difference between Korean and Western movie market?

The film industry around the world is dominated by various genres and stories. The entertainment industry, such as the film industry, is difficult to predict demand and high risk, but it is also a very profitable industry as it is high risk. 

Throughout Korea and the West, the film industry must be a high-risk industry. Common risks include investment risk, movie risk, box office risk, and credit risk. Despite such risks, the film industry is constantly developing.

The film industry has been operating for the global market since its inception. First of all, if you look at the Western film industry market, Hollywood and European film industries have formed a universal demand by exporting movies to the world. Since the 1950s, it has been advancing globalization through overseas production and international joint production. Hollywood focused on technological innovation and differentiation strategies to respond to changes in TV appearance and leisure demand, while developing models that focus on investment distribution by utilizing networks of many creators and producers through industrial flexibility. As the size of the overseas market grows in Hollywood's profit structure, international co-production and investment in local film production in strategic regions such as China and India are also active.

On the other hand, the Korean film industry has been growing since the 2000s, and the Hollywood film industry structure and synchronization are emerging. The media group represented by CJ E&M has been increasingly influential across industries, including broadcasting, games and the Internet, as well as investment, distribution and screening sectors. The distribution market for Korean films has changed from the way production companies and small and medium-sized local distributors were conducted, to the structure in which central distributors open simultaneously at multiplexes nationwide since the mid-2000s. Recently, multiplexes have taken up an absolute majority of theaters nationwide and have become the form of theaters themselves. Investment funds are also expanding to video-specialized investment associations, institutional investors, and the financial sector, and wide-area releases have become the way commercial films are released. The perception of film industry workers has also changed significantly, with organizations seeking rights as workers and moves to improve treatment.

Also, expectations and pride for the national cultural product of Korean films are increasing greatly. The transition from an era when foreign currency imports were all about trade to an era where overseas expansion of Korean cultural content and international consumption take place is unprecedented in history. In the course of globalization, there is also a growing need to preserve their culture, language, and common historical experiences through movies. Globalization is a condition of cultural exchange in the form of a combination of universality and speciality in which globalization and localization progress together, and it takes a structure that further deepens each other. The overseas market strategy of Korean films is based on universality and requires a global strategy to meet the demand formed around major film festivals and markets, and the position of Korean films has gradually grown in the global market, with the recent worldwide success of the film "Parasite," Korea ranked fourth in the global film market (as of 2019).

If you look at the general characteristics, there are also differences along with many commonalities. When looking at the movie market in Korea and the West, the difference in systematic characteristics is most noticeable. When we look at the Western film market, we can look at the representative American star system. The star system is the center of the American film industry. It is essentially a Hollywood phenomenon, with a system that utilizes the popular popularity of a star or star corps in a film to fund film production and commercial success. So far, American filmmakers have relied on the star's popularity for the safety of box office success. Recently, large U.S. agencies have begun to exercise certain power by securing many stars, and as the market grows, the agency's star has begun to exercise even greater power. The star system in the U.S. can be seen as the center of power that stars and agents control Hollywood.

Looking at the Korean film market, while focusing on the popularity of commercial films through stars, the genre characteristic of the Korean film market is that there are quite a few political and social critical films compared to neighboring countries. There are also many movies in the genre that show social criticism and various problems, and in other countries, they do not implicitly make them under government pressure or social atmosphere, or they do not receive investment because the market itself is small in the first place. Of course, not only these movies but also comic, action, and melodramas. While the Western film market has strong agency power due to the star system, the Korean film industry has strong investment and distributor power. It is distribution that shows completed movies in each theater. In the U.S., large Hollywood production companies often take charge of investment, production, and distribution, and the directors' companies participate in the joint production. In Korea, however, distributors often invest together and leave the production to a company with a director. In this regard, the process of investment, distribution, and distribution has a major impact on the success of movies. This is because even if produced, the degree of exposure of the movie to the public will change in the process of distribution and distribution of each film.

Due to these differences, the Korean and Western film markets are similar and different.