South Korea faces culture crisis as films and K-pop fall flat at home

South Korea’s entertainment dominance seemed unshakable.

- Raphael Rashid

From BTS conquering the music charts to Parasite sweeping the Oscars in 2020 and Squid Game topping Netflix, Korean popular culture had never been more visible.Exports driven by the country’s arts hit a record $15.18bn (£11bn) in 2024, cementing its reputation as a cultural superpower.

But inside South Korea, cinema and K-pop are now undergoing fundamental transformations, potentially undermining the foundations of their success.

The decline in film is the most dramatic. Cinema admissions have fallen by 45% since 2019, while box office revenue has dropped from $1.3bn to $812m.

With investment slowing sharply, Korean distributors that once released more than 40 locally produced films a year have put out about 20 this year. They say 2026 could be “even more serious”, with a pandemic-era backlog running out and new productions not coming fast enough.

Kim Han-min, the director of the Yi Sun-sin trilogy, last year warned the sector had “almost collapsed”.

Jason Bechervaise, a professor of Korean film at Hanyang University, says it is not a short-term slump but a structural weakening. “Years of tightening margins and rising costs have thinned out the mid-budget productions where new directors once developed and established filmmakers experimented,” he says.