When the pandemic shuttered studios and froze productions in 2020, many filmmakers saw their dreams collapse. But South Korean visual-effects veteran Jang Seong-ho found an unexpected breakthrough.
His small studio, Mofac Studios, had been struggling to complete King of Kings, an animated adaptation of Charles Dickens’ The Life of Our Lord. Then, in a twist worthy of cinema, Hollywood stars including Kenneth Branagh, Oscar Isaac, Mark Hamill and Uma Thurman lent their voices to the film.
Released in the US around Easter, King of Kings became a phenomenon making it the most successful South Korean film ever released in the world’s largest movie market, surpassing the Oscar-winning Parasite.
It grossed US$60 million (NZ$104m) at the American box office and is now on track to surpass US$100m globally by Christmas, not counting streaming deals. Even more stunning, the movie was produced for just US$25m – a fraction of what companies like Walt Disney Co. or Sony Group Corp. typically spend.
Now Jang is chasing another improbable leap: harnessing artificial intelligence to reinvent the ways films are made. Backed by 6 billion won (NZ$7.5m) from Altos Ventures, Mofac is building in-house servers to power AI-based film-making platform on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine software.
He is betting AI can help halve production time and slash costs, enabling the studio to deliver a feature film and a series every year.
“The question we should be asked is, ‘Where did you use AI?’” Jang said at his studio in Seoul’s Gangnam district. “The true result will be when no one can tell. With a powerful leader holding AI as a tool, the work that once required hundreds of people could soon be done by just one or two.”
Mofac is part of a wider rush in Korea’s film industry to integrate AI technology as it struggles with weak box office returns and rising budgets. The South Korean film industry has seen the worst recovery after the pandemic, with new film releases more than halved from a peak.
Meditation with a Pencil, another Korean studio, is working on an animated remake of Hong Kong film A Better Tomorrow using AI-assisted tools. Galaxy Corp., a startup behind Parasite actor Song Kang-ho and K-pop star G-Dragon, is partnering with SKAI Intelligence and Nvidia’s Omniverse platform to create AI-based content and virtual characters.
Other Korean film studios such as 12.12: The Day maker Hive Media Corp. are also actively seeking ways to adopt AI tools to create animated or live-action films.
The initiative comes as the South Korean Government has pledged new funding for AI-driven animation and technology-based productions. Officials plan to create a dedicated fund for animation and expand budgets for projects using AI tools.
While the use of AI in film production remains under debate in the US, film-makers in Asia are already embracing video-generation tools, from OpenAI’s Sora to Chinese short-video giant Kuaishou’s Kling AI, which can create hyper-realistic clips in seconds.
Still, the technology continues to stir unease. Prominent film-makers worry the technology could replace jobs and reshape cinema’s creative language. Park Chan-wook, director of Old Boy and No Other Choice, said he hoped AI would remain “an extension of our toolbox, the way VFX once did”.
“It could also take away many jobs and fundamentally alter the aesthetics of cinema,” Park said in an interview during the Busan International Film Festival. “And that fills me with fear.”
For Mofac’s Jang, who relied on only five actors and motion capture technology to create his breakthrough film, those tensions are the point. King of Kings showed that a modestly resourced studio could stand toe-to-toe with Hollywood giants. He believes that AI will only accelerate that shift, if the industry is ready to embrace it.