Paramount+ to Launch in Japan via Partnerships With J:COM and Wowow

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s “Evil Does Not Exist” collected four nominations for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, making it the narrow favorite ahead of the three times nominated “Snow Leopard,” by the late Pema Tseden. The narrow lead matches the overall pattern this year’s, where Japanese and Chinese films dominate APSA nominations proceedings. Nominations were announced at midnight on Thursday in Gold Coast, Queensland, where the final awards will be celebrated on Nov. 3. “Evil Does Not Exist,” an eco-drama that premiered in Venice, is nominated in best film, best director, best screenplay and cinematography categories.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Johnny & Associates talent agency in Japan is to dissolve following scandal caused by the acts of sexual abuse conducted by the group’s late founder Johnny Kitagawa. The company announced on Monday that it will break itself into two parts – one to be called Smile-Up, entirely devoted to compensating victims – the other as a talent agency operating with a new name, that has yet to be decided. The group began to take action last month following two damning investigations that found that Kitagawa’s abuse had been hugely extensive and continued for years and that the company and Japanese media had ignored, if not covered it up. On Monday it said that some 325 victims had come forward to claim compensation. In a statement by Fujishima read out in her absence, the former chief executive, who owns 100% of the agency, said it was her duty as Kitagawa’s kin to put an end to Johnny & Associates. “I want to remove all traces of Johnny Kitagawa from this world,” her statement said.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief A trio of local films released in time for the Chuseok holiday season dominated the South Korean box office over the latest weekend. Comedy fantasy “Dr Cheon and the Lost Talisman” dominated. It earned $5.98 million between Friday and Sunday with a more than 48% market share.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief TIFFCOM, the rights market that sits alongside the Tokyo International Film Festival, is celebrating its return to an in-person format for the first time since 2019, with a move to another venue and the launch of the new Tokyo Story Market. The three-day market (Oct. 25-27) will relocate from Ikkebukuro to the Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Trade Center (aka Hamamatsucho-Kan) in Hamamatsucho district.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Revenues, losses and net liabilities all grew at art house streaming firm Mubi UK in the calendar year to end of December 2022, the company has disclosed. The company posted its annual trading statement in the last available week before the U.K.’s nine-month deadline for filing. And it reveals more information about itself than in previous years. The latest accounts showed that revenue grew by 53% in the January-December 2022 period, from £9.58 million ($11.7 million) to £14.7 million ($17.9 million).

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Netflix has given a green light to a third season of dystopian Japanese thriller series “Alice in Borderland.” The announcement was made by Netflix VP of APAC content, Kim Minyoung on the second day of the APOS conference in Indonesia. Based on the manga series of the same name by Aso Haro, “Alice in Borderland” follows the story of Arisu after he is transported to a parallel universe in which he has to play and win games to remain alive. The games are divided into four categories represented by suits on a deck of playing cards.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Equal numbers of Chinese and Japanese titles adorn the main competition section of the Toyo International Film Festival, which was announced on Wednesday – three each. Among the Chinese films is “Snow Leopard,” the last feature by the late Pema Tseden, and “Dwelling by the West Lake,” directed by Gu Xiaogang, the surprisingly inexperienced joint recipient of this year’s Kurosawa Award. The full competition with 15 titles, set to play between Oct. 23 and Nov.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Paramount+ has unveiled three new Korean TV shows which it will launch in selected international territories including North America, the U.K. and parts of continental Europe.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Locally-made fantasy drama “Sleep” headed the Korean box office charts for the third successive weekend. But theaters were comatose ahead of bigger new releases timed for the Chuseok holiday season. “Sleep” earned just $1.06 million between Friday and Sunday, with a 27.5% market share, according to data from Kobis the tracking service operated by the Korean Film Council. Its cumulative after 19 days in cinemas now stands at $9.50 million. The film’s three weekends at the top of the chart have coincided with low power competition and a month-long decline in cinema attendance.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Studio Ghibli, the iconic Japanese cartoon firm behind Miyazaki Hayao’s recent “The Boy and the Heron” is selling a controlling stake to Japanese broadcaster NTV.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Disney has given a green light to a second season of Japanese drama -horror series “Gannibal.” Set in a fictional Japanese village, season one of Gannibal saw recently relocated police officer Agawa Daigo arrive in his new home a broken man. Wrestling with his guilt over an event that traumatized his daughter, things started off promisingly for the new arrival before a series of alarming events quickly led Agawa to the horrifying realization that something was deeply wrong with the villagers and the mysterious Goto family.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Ozu Yasujiro, the leading Japanese film director behind classics including “Tokyo Story” and “Late Spring,” has had his double birth and death anniversaries – Ozu died in 1963 on the day of his 60th birthday, a little more than a year after the release of his last film “An Autumn Afternoon” – celebrated throughout 2023 at places as varied as the Cannes Film Festival, Los Angeles’ Margaret Herrick Library and the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute. But it falls to October’s Tokyo International Film Festival to put on this year’s biggest and most comprehensive reconstruction of Ozu’s surprisingly varied career. Working in conjunction with the National Film Archive of Japan, the festival will present an extensive retrospective that covers almost all the films that Ozu directed (TIFF/NFAJ Classics: Ozu Yasujiro Week) from Oct. 24-29. Ozu spent his entire career, from camera assistant in 1923 to renown director in 1962, as an employee of major Japanese studio Shochiku, with all the advantages and disadvantages such an arrangement brought. While Ozu is best known for his stripped-down dramas, often centered on family relationships, sometimes troubled or contentious, involving parents and young or grown-up children, many hinging on questions of marriage, generational misunderstandings or the loneliness of the elderly, the director’s register may not entirely have been of his own choosing. “The apparent consistency of the post-war films surely owes as much to this production situation as to Ozu’s aesthetic choices,” wrote critic Tony Rayns in a recent Sight & Sound portrait.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Steven Yeun has bucked stereotypes and carved a new niche as sexy Asian leading man with his roles in “Burning” and “Beef.” Justin Chon transitioned from a supporting role in “Twilight” to directing “Gook,” “Jamojaya” and half of Apple TV+’s “Pachinko.” And Busan-born Daniel Dae Kim has expanded from “Lost” and “Hawaii” to becoming one of Hollywood’s leading producers. The stateside successes of Korean-born and Korean American talent are growing and are worth celebrating. But the Busan International Film Festival’s planned party is being dialed down a notch under the impact of the twin writers’ and SAG Actors strikes in the U.S. Busan’s ‘Special Program in Focus: Korean Diasporic Cinema’ will go ahead with a screening schedule including six films, public talk sessions that include Oscar-winning actor Youn Yuh-jung, Lee Isaac Chung, director of Oscar-winning film “Minari,” and John Cho, the Seoul-born “Star Trek” and “Searching” star.

Vanessa Redgrave To Be Feted At European Film Awards

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Japanese comedian Shinagawa Hiroshi has been set as the director of “Among the Dead,” the first project flowing from the co-production and co-financing venture between U.S.-based People of Culture Studios and Japan’s Yoshimoto Kogyo. The previously-announced project is an English-language, found footage zombie movie in which, following an apocalypse of the undead, one emotionally unstable man abandons friends and family to go live among the few remaining zombies before they’re all gone. The screenplay was written by father/daughter duo, Andy Cosby (“Hellboy,” “2 Guns” “Eureka”) and Charlie Danger Cosby, collectively known as Midnight Pizza. Other writing credits go to Brian Caldirola, Patrick Hasson and Juan Carlos Saizarbitoria. Shinagawa is one-half of the comedy duo Shinagawa Shoji, alongside Tomoharu Shoji, and has a considerable acting filmography in his own right including “Kantoku Kansen,” “Deadman Inferno,” “One Third,” and “Drop.” Shinagawa additionally served as director, writer, and starred in the 2011 comedy-drama “Slapstick Brothers,” which won a Citizen’s Choice Award for feature film and an award from the Japanese Academy for rookie of the year.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Japan’s Dean Fujioka (“Fullmetal Alchemist,” “The Man From The Sea”) and the U.K.’s Callum Woodhouse (“All Creatures Great and Small,” “The Durrells”) are set to star in “Orang Ikan,” a WWII-set creature horror film. The picture is scripted by Singapore and Indonesia-based Mike Wiluan (“Buffalo Boys,” HBO series “Grisse”) who will also direct the picture from next month. International rights to “Orang Ikan” have been picked up by London-based SC Films International, which will give the project its sales launch at the Busan festival and accompanying market next month. Set in the Pacific, 1942, a Japanese ship transports prisoners of war to occupied territories as slave labor.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief A+E Networks is continuing its investment in Korean entertainment content with “A Good Day to Be a Dog,” a fantasy romantic comedy that will upload from Oct. 11. Within Korea, the show will play on public broadcaster MBC and Lifetime Korea, releasing at the rate of one episode per week, every Wednesday.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Netflix and SK Broadband, one of South Korea’s largest internet service providers, said that they were ending all their lawsuits and would instead create a strategic partnership to provide better entertainment experiences to Korean customers. The legal dispute began in 2020 over whether content providers that generate large amounts of traffic should pay “network usage fees” in addition to the bills paid by the household end users, or whether that would go against the principle of net neutrality and lead to higher costs for consumers. Netflix said that it could offer a technological solution to traffic volume that it had provided to ISPs in other countries and to rival ISPs in Korea. But SK Telecom and its subsidiary SK Broadband held out and appeared to gain support for their position in the Korean parliament. “This strategic partnership with Netflix originates from the philosophy of SK Telecom and SK Broadband, where customer value is prioritized, and comes as part of our efforts to provide customers with an enhanced media service environment,” said SK Telecom’s Choi Hwanseok, VP of corporate strategy. “The partnership with SK Telecom, a leader in Korea’s telecommunication and innovative technology industries, holds special significance as it enables Netflix to enhance entertainment experiences for a broader Korean audience,” said Tony Zameczkowski, Netflix VP of APAC partnerships. “By teaming up with Netflix, SK Telecom and SK Broadband aim to help customers enjoy Netflix shows and films on mobile devices and IPTV (B tv) with easier access and payment options.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Cobweb,” the Kim Jee-woon-directed satire that debuted at Cannes this year, has been cleared for theatrical release in its native Korea later this month. On Monday it saw off an injunction that sought to derail its hometown debut. The film is a tongue in cheek tribute to the Korean movies of the 1970s and plays partly as a film within a film, jumping from color to black and white as it does so. It stars Song Kang-ho (“Parasite,” “Broker”) as director Kim, who needs just two more days of reshoots to craft a new ending to his latest film (also called “Cobweb”) so that it will no longer be the trashy potboiler everyone thought he was making.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Johnny and Associates, the high-profile Japanese talent agency whose deceased founder and long-time president Johnny Kitagawa has been revealed as a serial sexual abuser, will forgo some of its fee income as a step toward victim compensation. The move appears to be an attempt to lessen the company’s toxic brand following the now-confirmed revelations about the late Kitagawa’s predatory behavior.