‘Hellbound’ producer Climax Studio’s CEO on the rise of Korea’s TV and film industry

Hot on the heels of the international phenomenon Squid Game, South Korea has continued to supply global audiences with popular series such as director Yeon Sang-ho’s Hellbound and military deserter drama D.P. — both of which were produced for Netflix by Climax Studio, headed by CEO Seungmin Byun.

According to the streaming giant, supernatural cult mystery Hellbound’s six episodes clocked 43.5 million viewing hours after its November premiere. And Netflix has greenlit director Han Jun-hee’s D.P., to which production company Shotcake is also attached, for a second season since its release last summer.

Climax Studio has also co-­produced upcoming series Monstrous with Korea’s other leading drama production house, Studio Dragon, and South Korean streamer Tving. The supernatural thriller — directed by Jang Kunjae (A Midsummer’s Fantasia) and written by Yeon and Yong-Jae Ryu — is set to play at Canneseries’ Korea Focus in April. Climax Studio is also in the middle of shooting the highly antici­pated make-a-wish hospice drama series If You Wish Upon Me for A+E Networks Korea, directed by Kim Yong Wan.

“Korea has always been a place containing a lot of stories. It is a unique country with an armistice [that halted fighting in the Korean War in 1953] and from outside, we look to be a very politically unstable place in danger of war,” says Byun, explaining how the country’s recent history has helped fuel the rise of its creative industries. “Being situated in the midst of several powerful nations, we’ve always had a lot of conflicts. Rapid economic development had its good points but also its side effects — conflicts between the classes, generations and genders. But they also provide many opportunities to speak out.

“It’s the same for political changes,” Byun continues. “I don’t think there has been another country where people have made such efforts to bring down presidents or make presidents, or have sent as many presidents to jail. Politically, socially and economically, it’s a tremendously exciting country which has a great amount of stories.”

Byun also cites the role new tech platforms have played in distributing Korean content around the world, boosted by the country’s wide pool of available talent. “It’s not just for films and series, but music and any artistic field where stories apply,” he says of this talent pool. “The reason why, for instance, Korea became the mother country of webtoons [web cartoons] is because there are few countries where such a variety of people can tell so many plentiful stories.”

Ramping up production

Climax Studio has a year-round staff of eight working across development, production and management, expanding to several hundred when it crews up for productions. Byun estimates the company’s 2022 revenues will be between $65m and $73m. It has plans to release five to six titles this year, and, although it is a smaller organisation, its number of productions is comparable to the CJ ENM-backed Studio Dragon. Thanks to the series it is producing for global OTTs with leading directors and producers, Climax Studio has earned a reputation as a company to watch in Korea.

A lifelong fan of film and TV who as a youth would avidly take notes on films by directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Byun learned about the industry from the bottom up when he started out doing grunt work on film productions in college. In 2009, he joined investment and distribution company NEW, where he worked on the financing and release of films ranging from Lee Chang-dong’s Cannes prize-winner Poetry (2010) to box-office hit Miracle In Cell No. 7 (2012). He later moved to Warner Brothers Korea to head its local film division, overseeing titles such as The Age Of Shadows (2016) and Champion (2018) starring Don Lee (aka Ma Dong-seok), before turning his attention to television in 2018 when he started production and investment firm Lezhin Studio.

Backed by Lezhin Entertainment, Lezhin Studio produced a number of popular titles including tvN’s The Cursed, directed by Kim Yong Wan and written by Yeon, before Byun took the company independent in January 2021, buying out Lezhin’s shares and parting ways amicably. Changing the company’s name to Climax Studio and looking to work with a diverse range of partners, Byun then sold the company to major local cable broadcaster JTBC in June 2021 when it was making a series of deals to build up its content division, providing stable backing for the company.

“I thought about the collapse of the boundaries between film and series and saw how I could bring the experience, information and human resources I gained in the film industry to making drama series,” he explains of his pivot in a country where TV and film producers traditionally did not mix until very recently.

Finding theatrical running times limiting and seeing how audiences responded to directors’ cuts and expanded versions of films, Byun notes that, “In a way, series allow an auteur to tell their story more completely.”

One of the processes he brought from the film industry was to base budgets on detailed scripts when collaborating with broadcasters. “In the past, a 16-episode series would go into discussions to air with only four episodes’ scripts available,” says Byun. “The budget would be set and further writing would be adapted to that. Sometimes it would affect the quality or people would have to stretch to pull in sponsors. But you have more rationale with a completed script and can be more accurate about how much time and cost will be required.”

Byun notes there is a large variance in budgets for Korean dramas depending on genres. “There are those that go below krw1bn [$815,000] per episode and those that go above. In the past, the line was at krw500m [$407,500] but inflation and cast and crew costs have gone up, and schedules are longer because of labour terms.”

Climax Studio still produces feature films — for instance, The Cursed: Dead Man’s Prey (2021), an extension of the Yeon-written and Kim-directed series with the two continuing in the same roles, and Yeon’s upcoming dystopian cloning thriller Jung_E, a Netflix original.

Byun says he does not think too much about what is trending when choosing which films and series to produce. “I think of myself as the first viewer and look for what excites me as a longtime fan of the writers and directors, and what I want to see from them,” he states. “We’re aiming to make modern classics that can compete with the titles we produce in 20 years’ time.”

Aside from the difficulties of producing amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Byun says one of the notable challenges for production companies in Korea is how invested the public is in the industry. “OTT titles, in the two to three weeks before release, will see their related companies’ stock prices go up,” he observes. “Many members of the public look at films not just as content to be consumed, but from a business point of view and directly connected to their financial lives.

“This is an industry but also art. But rather than evaluating a work artistically, if it doesn’t do well at the box office or they see a loss, they will criticise it indiscriminately on the internet without even seeing it,” adds Byun, noting how local film criticism has become “watered down” by aggressive online activity.

As to the impact of successes such as Squid Game and multiple Oscar-winner Parasite on Korean companies such as his own, Byun is clear. “It has cut down on the time it takes to introduce ourselves,” he says. “To be able to spend less time explaining what kind of company we are and what kind of infrastructure we have in this country and how much what we produce can appeal to global audiences — that is great for competitiveness.”

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