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TIME MAGAZINE, JUNE 4, 2001, VOL.157 NO.22
Roll the Credits
Want to make a hit film Korea-style? Give online fans a piece of the action and then send them out to promote their investment
By DONALD MACINTYRE Seoul
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Ki Ho Park for TIME.
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Shares in "Friends" were snapped up in less than a minute.
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You're a teenage girl and your computer says you've got mail. "A personal message," it reads. You click it open, a video whirs and there he is, in all his boyish glory: "Hi, I'm Leonardo Di Caprio and I've just made the movie Gangs of New York. I really hope you'll come and see me." If film promoter Kim Dong Joo can pull it off, hordes of Korean fans will receive this online missive just before the movie's Christmas-season release in Seoul. For girls who can't get enough of the Titanic heartthrob it's a "fantastic illusion," says Kim, who began his career at 20th Century Fox promoting Die Hard II the old way, via billboards and newspaper ads. "The Internet is the movie marketing tool of the future," he says. "If you aren't on top of it, you won't survive."
Kim first tried the e-mail stunt earlier this year with Friends, a star-studded buddy flick set in the port city of Pusan in the 1970s. Using a name list culled from an online site, his company, Korea Pictures, fired off a video pitch featuring the film's star Jang Dong Gun (sort of a South Korean Tom Cruise) to 1 million hard-core moviegoers. The movie this month became Korea's biggest blockbuster ever. It's hard to know exactly how much the Internet helped, but if an online pitch is going to work anywhere, it's in Korea. The country has more high-speed data lines per head than anywhere else in the world, and nearly half the population is online.
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The movie industry is increasingly bringing fans into the picture. Promoters are using Internet movie sites like instant social polls, testing the buzz and calibrating marketing campaigns accordingly.
But the most ambitious innovation is revolutionizing how movies are financed and promoted. Koreans can now invest directly in films through online entertainment funds, with stakes as small as $10. Money raised by a fund goes toward production costs, and investors get a share of the profits if the movie is a hit (if it flops, they lose). Besides the funding, production companies get a squad of investor-marketers who care as much about box office numbers as they do about whether the guy gets the girl. Choi Chang Yeop, a 31-year-old freelance business lecturer, invested $750 in the film Jakarta and is among the new movie minimoguls. He spends hours on the Web posting glowing reviews of his film, a black comedy about bank robbers. He urges fellow Netizens to see the flick and has joined a Web-based club whose members meet off-line to exchange tips. Not that he thought the film was that great. "What can I say?" says Choi, "I've got a stake in it." He expects his fund to yield a profit of more than 30% from ticket sales, export revenue, and video and online rights.
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The phenomenon began late last year with the the blockbuster action flick Joint Security Area. More than 400 small investors put up $75,000 through an online fund and then watched their money double from ticket sales and other revenue. That caught the attention of stock market punters smarting from slumping share prices. When a similar online fund for Friends debuted in March, investors snapped up all shares in less than a minute. Friends might have been huge anyway—it has tapped a vein of nostalgia for a simpler era. But giving moviegoers a stake also helped. When the film flopped at Korea's version of the Academy Awards—not winning a single prize—fans swamped Internet movie sites, slamming the ceremony. It matters what these people think. "Netizens, the Internet generation, decide whether a movie lives or dies," says Kim Hyuk, head of the Korean Film Directors' Association.
As for Di Caprio, he is busy filming Gangs of New York and hasn't okayed Kim's idea. But the Korean promoter thinks he'll come through. After all, millions of teenagers are on hold for download.
With reporting by Stella Kim/Seoul
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