Lotte Cultureworks’ Canneseries Selection ‘Pale Moon’ Confirms Launch Dates

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Toho, Japan’s most powerful movie studio, is launching a production services offshoot intended to assist and grow foreign film and TV shoots in the country.Toho Tombo Pictures is a joint venture with Japan-based producer Georgina Pope, who has worked with the top entertainment companies around the globe for more than 30 years. The new company will be headed by Shimada Mitsuru, who currently serves as president of Toho Studios, as representative director of Toho Tombo Pictures. Pope, Ueda Koji and Toho Studios executive Sudo Tetsushi will serve as directors. Ueda is GM of international business of Toho and VP of U.S. subsidiary, Toho International, Inc.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Cannes Market has hitched up with the Ties That Bind and Focus Asia organizations to launch Spotlight Asia, a new industry support structure. Debuting during this year’s Cannes film festival, the program aims to foster greater film collaboration between Asia and Europe. Spotlight Asia will take the form of a series of round table discussions, short presentations and networking events between May 16-24. They will cover genres ranging from fiction to animation. The collaborative events will especially focus on the tools that potential co-producers from Europe and Asia need to equip themselves with in order to navigate the different forms of cooperative working, ranging from introducing existing funding opportunities to helping navigate each country’s specific laws and production functionalities.

Netflix has said it will invest $2.5BN in South Korean series, films and unscripted shows over the next four years.

Paramount+ is expanding its global Korean originals slate with two new series, A Bloody Lucky Day and Queen Woo, which the streamer will launch exclusively on its global platform. In South Korea, the series will be available on TVing, the streaming service launched by Korean powerhouse CJ ENM.

Marta Balaga There was no escaping K-content in Cannes this year, with South Korea delivering well-received Canneseries competition title “Bargain,” MIPTV’s showcase of new formats, all hoping to dethrone “The Masked Singer,” Kortop Media’s “Midnight Horror: Different Nights,” “Pale Moon,” sold by KT Studiogenie and, finally, CJ ENM’s “Island.”  Co-created by Bae Jong and Jang Jeong Do, the show – produced by Studio Dragon and YLAB – is based on a popular comic book, first published in 1997. It has since been turned into webtoons, web novels and dramas, always combining the fantastical with the ordinary. 

Norwegian comedy series Power Play has won Best Series in the Canneseries International Competition.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Studiocanal has sold two new thrillers from Benelux to international buyers at MipTV in Cannes. The eight-part crime thriller “1985,” produced by Eyeworks for Belgian public broadcasters VRT and RTBF, follows three friends as they move to Brussels and get caught up in the horrifying events of Belgium’s most notorious unsolved crime spree that shocked a generation and left a scar on the entire country. The series went to SBS Australia; Filmin for Portugal and Spain; Canal+ for France, Czech Republic and Slovakia; TG4 in Ireland; and Free TV in Israel.

Ed Meza @edmezavar CJ ENM Sells Remake Rights to hit Korean Drama ‘Train’ to Firebrand Studios The U.K.’s Firebird Studios has acquired remake rights for hit Korean drama “Train” from entertainment giant CJ ENM. “Train” follows a detective investigating his love’s death who discovers a parallel universe, where his late partner is very much alive. Moving back and forth between the two worlds, he tracks down the truth behind her death in one, while protecting her in the other. “With two unforgettable central characters, ‘Train’ is a love story, a detective show, a journey across the multiverse,” said Firebird Pictures CEO Elizabeth Kilgariff. It’s “a story that defies expectations at every turn and one that we can’t wait to re-tell in a British setting.”

BLACKPINK at Coachella, there’s no need to freak.The beloved K-Pop group, who just became the first Korean act to ever headline Coachella, is embarking on a four-show stadium ‘Encore’ of their ‘Born Pink Tour’ this August. On Aug.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Google is bringing together more than 800 livestreaming channels — including news channels from ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox — into a new guide in the Google TV interface. Google TV is launching free built-in channels that users can watch without downloading or launching an app. In total, it now offers over 800 channels and premium programming, including the addition of free channels from Fox Corp.’s Tubi, Plex and Haystack News, alongside the existing lineup of channels from Paramount Global’s Pluto TV. Google TV also provides channels from around the world, with programming in more than 10 languages including Spanish, Hindi and Japanese.

As the launch bay door closed on Star Wars Celebration 2023, Disney’s Jedi Counsel announced the timing and location of the gathering’s next installment. Fans and talent will next get together and celebrate a galaxy far, far away in a year that may itself seem far away at this point: 2025.

Stray Kids have added concerts in Los Angeles, Japan and the Philippines to the upcoming 2023 leg of their ‘Maniac’ world tour.On November 7, the group shared a string of announcements unveiling additional dates for their 2023 ‘Maniac’ world tour. These include a series of “encore” shows in Los Angeles and the cities of Tokyo and Osaka in Japan.

The time and date that a test emergency alarm will sound on mobiles across the UK has been confirmed.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Far East Film Festival in Italy’s Udine will open with a double bill of He Shuming’s “Ajoomma” and Kai Ko’s “Bad Education.” It will close with Zhang Yimou’s blockbuster period epic “Full River Red.” In between, the festival will showcase a stunning 78-title array of commercial and art-house films from across East Asia. Operating according to a motto of diversity –implying cultural asymmetries and artistic multiplicities – the 25th edition of the festival will run April 21-29. Organizers say that their selection “shows in real time how the cinemas of East and Southeast Asia have re-emerged from the gruelling period of the pandemic, not all in the same way and not all with the same results.”

Singapore is launching a S$10M ($7.5M) fund to attract international productions to work with local filmmakers and shine a spotlight on the city. 

EXCLUSIVE: Korea’s Lotte Cultureworks is teaming with Desert Bloom Pictures to produce a Korean-language adaptation of autism comedy drama On The Spectrum, which was originally produced by Israel’s Yes TV.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Sony group companies, Aniplex of America and streaming service Crunchyroll are to begin simulcast streams of anime series “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Swordsmith Village Arc” from April 9. Crunchyroll will simulcast new episodes every week where the service is available, and exclusively in North America, South America, and Europe.  The underlying manga series was published under Shueisha’s Jump Comics operation, consists of 23 volumes and has seen sales of over 150 million copies. The animation production is by Ufotable. The narrative began when Tanjiro Kamado, a boy whose family is killed by a demon, joins the Demon Slayer Corps to turn his younger sister Nezuko back into a human after she is transformed into a demon.

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has confirmed that striker Darwin Nunez is in contention for tomorrow lunchtime's Premier League showdown with Manchester City at the Etihad Stadium.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Netflix will give a May launch to “Sanctuary,” a sports drama series set in the specialized world of Japanese sumo wrestling. Produced by the Slowtide company for the streamer, the show follows a juvenile delinquent who becomes a sumo apprentice. He soon finds himself on a collision course with a voiceless wrestler carrying a secret. Netflix pitches it as “a gritty look into the underbelly of professional sumo, a world full of young men with ambitions for money, women, fame, and power […] where some may find sanctuary with a history of more than 1,500 years in Japan’s traditional culture and as a religious ceremony.”

Black Knight.Black Knight, based on the the popular 2017 to 2019 webtoon Delivery Knight, follows the adventures of legendary deliveryman ‘5-8’ and the refugee Sa-wol in a future, dystopian Korea that has been devastated by severe air pollution. The series will premiere globally on May 12, exclusively on Netflix.The series will star Our Blues actor Kim Woo-bin as ‘5-8’.