Why a Korean film exec is betting big on AI

One of the first projects Hyun Park spearheaded when he began working for South Korea’s entertainment powerhouse Studio Dragon was a dystopian sci-fi drama—much to the chagrin of his boss. “The CEO said: Koreans don’t do sci-fi,” Park recalls. “It’s a Hollywood thing. The budgets are too big. It doesn’t really make sense. It will never look real.”

His boss had a point. Big, splashy science fiction dramas with expansive futuristic worlds and lots of special effects were a rarity in the Korean studio system. “For the past 30–40 years, we’ve done amazing family dramas and romantic comedies,” Park says. “We’ve always failed in sci-fi.”

Park believes it’s time to change this—and he’s betting on AI to help. This month, Park’s production company Alquimista Media was acquired for an undisclosed amount by Utopai East, the Korea-based offshoot of Utopai Studios, a Silicon Valley company focused on AI film production. Together, they now want to infuse Korea’s film industry with AI, and ultimately help local creatives film the movies and shows they couldn’t make before.

“We [are] telling our creators: Now, you have tools to do something that’s different,” Park says. “Bring us the idea that you wanted to do when you were younger, but everyone told you [was] impossible because we don’t have the budget, and we all look Asian.” 

‘Squid Game’ changed everything

That’s another thing Korea’s film industry struggled with for a long time, as Park knows firsthand. For the past few decades, studios would primarily produce content for domestic audiences, with little of it ever making it overseas. As Hollywood bet on ever-bigger franchises with massive budgets and big, recognizable stars, Korean and other Asian shows and movies were largely ignored.

That is until Netflix started licensing Korean dramas en masse. The streamer got its first breakout hit with Squid Game, the dystopian show about a life-or-death reality TV competition that premiered in 2021 and has since become Netflix’s most popular show of all time. The success prompted the company to double down on South Korea: After committing to spending $500 million on South Korean content in 2021, Netflix upped its investment to $2.5 billion in 2023.

That year, 8% of all viewing hours on Netflix were Korean content, according to data from Ampere Analysis. Since then, viewing hours for Korean movies and shows have surpassed that of any other country save for the United States every single year on Netflix. 

Squid Game’s success also caused other streamers to shift course: Disney Plus grew its share of Korean content from practically zero in 2021 to more than 4% last year, according to data from Justwatch. The total number of available Korean titles on global streaming platforms grew about 60% over the same period, according to the company, which tracks available titles across all major streamers.

“Thanks to Netflix, Korean content is here,” Park says. 

Doing more with less, with some help from AI

Despite all that, the past few years haven’t exactly been smooth sailing for South Korea’s film industry. Domestic box office sales have declined 45% between 2019 and 2025 as audiences have embraced streaming. At the same time, production costs have increased, with studios spending more and more money to please international audiences. “Everyone’s talking about Korean content, but we’re having such a hard time here,” Park says.

In other words: Korean studios are forced to do more with less—and AI may just be the answer. Utopai Studios, the company that acquired Park’s production company this month, initially launched as an AI startup called Cybever in 2022. At first, the company primarily focused on building AI video generation and production tools, but quickly changed course to also produce its own movies and shows.

Big tech companies like Google and OpenAI have all partnered with filmmakers to promote their AI video models, but the results of those partnerships are often not more than that: Promotional clips meant to show off the capabilities of technology, not to entertain and make money on their own.

That kind of mandate also impacts the story. “Most of the AI content available today is 100% AI-generated,” says Utopai East CEO Kevin Chong. “It’s less about storytelling.” His company instead wants to keep creatives front and center, and use AI simply to turbocharge their work. “All of our production is done with real writers, real directors,” Chong says. “We’re not replacing actors with AI. It’s really about reducing physical production [costs].”

This could mean using AI to generate the kind of rough, animated versions of a film that studios use internally to map out scenes long before actors utter their first lines, known among Hollywood insiders as previsualization. It could mean relying on AI during post-production, when captured footage is edited and effects are added. 

It could, one day, also extend to virtual production—a relatively new approach embraced by Hollywood giants like Marvel and Lucasfilm that turns the way action movies are made on its head: Instead of filming actors in front of green screens and adding fantasy worlds and other visual effects in post production, everything is being rendered in real time. This not only makes it easier to change camera angles and other things on the fly, it also has the potential to make movies and TV shows faster and cheaper.

Utopia East currently has 15 projects in the works. The first ones made with AI could be released as early as next year. And while AI use in Hollywood has not been without controversies, Park believes that audiences will ultimately love his company’s approach, because it’s playing to the strengths of South Korea’s film industry. 

“It’s giving us tools for different types of storytelling, and Koreans are very good at that,” Park says.

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