Korean cinema grows abroad when local creators lead
Mansion of Mr. Hua topped Vietnam's box office with a Vietnamese creative team and Korean financing behind it. The export was the relationship, not the format.
A found-footage horror film about a haunted Ho Chi Minh City mansion reached No. 1 at the Vietnamese box office six days after release, and the most interesting thing about it is what the Korean partner did not do. Korean cinema's strongest route into Southeast Asia hands local creators the story and supplies expertise as infrastructure underneath it, and Mansion of Mr. Hua is the case for that being a repeatable model rather than a lucky June.
Runup Vietnam and Korea's Hive Media Corp. co-produced the film, which drew its premise from a real mansion and local ghost stories (KOFIC's Korean Film magazine, July 13, 2026). Vietnamese filmmakers led story development, production, direction, acting and marketing. Hive Media supplied planning experience, production support and financing. Local knowledge shaped the fear, the space and the folklore, while Korean capital and production systems carried the project to market scale. The partnership needed no Korean characters on screen and no borrowed Korean plot to work.
A second version is forming in Indonesia. KOFIC cited Ghost in the Cell, co-produced by Korea's Barunson E&A with Indonesian director Joko Anwar's Come and See Pictures, with Barunson also handling international sales. The film drew 3.36 million admissions in Indonesia and premiered at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival. Both cases treat relationships and skills as the thing being exported, and leave the finished film rooted in its own culture.
Credits are a weak place to look for power. Financing, sales access and intellectual-property contracts can hand the Korean partner more control than the billing suggests, and a locally cast film can reproduce extraction behind the camera. Fast expansion can flatten distinct Southeast Asian cultures into a single market category. The evidence here is also early: one Vietnamese box-office leader and one Indonesian festival selection are two data points, not a regional system.
KOFIC's policy response is where that gets tested at scale. Its 2026 International Co-production Pilot Program offers up to KRW 500 million per selected project; the first-half call drew 19 applications, 11 of them involving Southeast Asian partners, and a development-support program is planned for 2027. Public money can require what contracts otherwise obscure: clear creative leadership, shared rights, transparent local spending. Those terms are how respect becomes a production structure instead of a press-release adjective.
Results through June 30, 2027 will show which it was. Two or more pilot-backed Southeast Asian co-productions reaching production with local writers and directors, disclosed shared-IP terms, and either a top-five local box-office finish or official selection at Berlin, Cannes or Venice, and the model is real. A program that mainly finances Korean remakes, or leaves ownership undisclosed, makes Mansion of Mr. Hua an exception that flattered everyone involved.