Over the next two years, Netflix will invest US$200 million (around R$1 billion) in the production of Brazilian content. Our country is the platform’s third largest market, behind only the United States and the United Kingdom in terms of number of subscribers.
In South Korea, which has less than a quarter of our population, the streaming giant plans to spend US$2.5 billion (around R$12.5 billion) over the next four years. It is not the subscriber base that Netflix has in the country that justifies this number, which is much smaller than that of Brazil. Much less the Korean language, which is only spoken there and has no international penetration.
Columnist Mauricio Stycer brought this data in his most recent column in Sheet. And he himself points out the reason for such a discrepancy.
“The focus is on the potential acceptance of local content in the global market. In other words, Korean content, such as ‘Round 6’ and numerous serialized melodramas, have proven to be highly attractive to the company’s customers around the world, which is not the case , not even remotely, with Brazilian productions.”
It’s not just Netflix that has turned to South Korea to boost its catalog. “Doramas” took HBO Max by storm, which also produced in Brazil a series linked to the k-pop universe, ” Além do Guarda-Roupa “.
Paramount+ also acquired dozens of films and series produced in South Korea, and reached an agreement with a local platform, TVing, to produce seven original series. The second of them, “Barganha”, was released on October 6th, and has achieved great repercussion.
The premise of “Bargain” is scary. Men are lured to an isolated hotel in the hope of encounters with prostitutes who claim to be virgins in their online advertisements. Once there, they are arrested and gagged, and their internal organs are auctioned off.
That alone would make for an intense story, but “Barganha” goes further. At the end of the first of six episodes, an earthquake reduces the hotel to rubble. The viewer then follows the fight for survival of three characters who hate each other: one of the recruiters who pretends to be a prostitute, her client, and the boy who bought a kidney from that client. All this in long sequence shots, which generates more immediacy and tension.
“Barganha” is a masterpiece of inventiveness and execution, but it didn’t fall from the sky. The miniseries is just the latest phenomenon in a cultural industry full of them. Among the most eye-catching trophies in “made in Korea” entertainment are the film “Parasite”, bands like BTS and Blackpink, series like “Round 6” and even the musical competition The Masked Singer.
And how did a relatively small country, with a language that no one else speaks, manage to become a global power in content production? A simplified answer: the state and the private sector joined hands, and worked together for decades to increase South Korea’s “soft power”.
Yes, “soft power”: the influence that a country exercises without having to resort to weapons, and that Brazil thought it had for free for a long time. After all, one survey after another showed that the rest of the planet saw us almost as a paradise, with stunning beaches, good music, beautiful people and lots of caipirinhas.
Times have changed, and so has Brazil. Our international image has been almost destroyed in the last four years, and it will take a while to recover. A worldwide successful series would really help, something we haven’t had yet.
We came close, it’s true. Netflix’s “Invisible City” was among the 10 most watched programs on the platform in several countries. This was repeated on a much larger scale with the excellent “Cangaço Novo”, by Amazon Prime Video.
But where is our “Round 6”? We have the talent to do so. What is missing is a long-term strategy. Market regulation, incentive laws, screen quotas and, above all, the awareness that the creative industry is one of the pillars of our economy, generating millions of jobs and millions in taxes.
However, many people still think that the Rouanet Law is only useful for renowned artists to buy apartments in Paris. As long as this petty and provincial mentality persists, South Korea will continue to give us a dance.
