SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of “The Madison,” now streaming on Paramount+.
The too-brief first season of “The Madison” has come to an end, and after six tear-jerking episodes, fans are already looking forward to what a second season will bring for the Clyburns. The first season focused on Stacy Clyburn (Michelle Pfeiffer), who packed up and moved her family from bustling New York City to Montana after the death of her husband and family patriarch, Preston (Kurt Russell).
While no date has been set for the second season, it was already filmed before the show premiered. Because of that, during the press cycle for Season 1, stars Michelle and Russell were able to preview what audiences can expect next season.
“It’s after the initial stage of raw grief passes, and some time has gone by,” Pfeiffer says. “It’s the messy and profound rebuilding of everything that you knew after everything that you knew has fallen apart and what that looks like.”
Christina Alexandra Voros, who directed every episode of Season 1, also teased the idea of moving on in the next season.
“I think by the end of Season 1, there are a number of questions to be answered in terms of what the next steps will be for the Clyburn family,” she says. “Season 2 begins to delve into that.”
Russell adds that a darkness comes into the show’s second season.
“I think it’s fair to say that in Season 2 — and I believe Michelle will agree with me — what happens is the level of real danger goes up,” he says. “Things begin to become dangerous in realistic ways.”
When it comes to realism, Russell says the script’s relatability in Season 1 was a main element that appealed to him.
“It was a matter of reading it and saying, ‘Wow, at what point was [writer Taylor Sheridan] a fly on the wall in our house?’” he says. “We lived part of the time in Los Angeles, but I did move to Colorado when I was 26 years old to live the way I wanted to live and still be in the business. When I read it, I realized how, for the first time, I was going to play somebody similar to myself, as opposed to somebody who was a broad character or something in a very different genre. This is in the wheelhouse of reality, relatability as human beings, one to the other. It’s adventure of the soul, and I was right for it. There were both sides of this guy. I’ve lived it. So it was more bringing the right thing for Michelle and for the show, which I felt confident in doing.”
Voros also says she felt an intense closeness to the material.
“I would be hard-pressed to imagine a story that felt more organic for me,” she says. “I’m a Boston-raised, longtime New York City-living gal who met a cowboy on a Western in Mississippi, and now live in West Texas. My husband’s actually our animal coordinator on this show, and a lot of the ‘Yellowstone’ shows. The idea of being someone who identifies as being from a city and discovering not only a part of the country that is foreign to you, but the part of yourself that emerges when you transplant yourself into a different environment, and makes you question your identity and the choices one makes in how to live their life. It was a wild script to end up on my doorstep, because it felt so incredibly personal to me.”
Brendon’s family shared the news of his death in a statement shared with The Hollywood Reporter, which reads, “We are heartbroken to share the passing of our brother and son, Nicholas Brendon. He passed in his sleep of natural causes.”
“Nicky loved to share his enthusiastic talent with his family, friends and fans. He was passionate, sensitive, and endlessly driven to create. Those who truly knew him understood that his art was one of the purest reflections of who he was,” the statement continued. “While it’s no secret that Nicholas had struggles in the past, he was on medications and treatment to manage his diagnosis and he was optimistic about the future at the time of his passing. Our family asks for privacy during this time as we grieve his loss and celebrate the life of a man who lived with intensity, imagination, and heart.”
The actor previously revealed in 2023 that he suffered a heart attack and had been diagnosed with a congenital heart defect. He also had cauda equina syndrome, which led to several spinal surgeries.
Sarah Michelle Gellar, the title character, took to Instagram Saturday morning to share a tribute. “‘They’ll never know how tough it is to be the one who isn’t chosen. To live so near to the spotlight, and never step in it. But I know. I see more than anybody realizes, because nobody’s watching me,’” I saw you Nicky. I know you are at peace, in that big rocking chair in the sky,” she wrote quoting his character, Xander, in the show, along with a nostalgic photo of the pair.
David Boreanaz, who played Angel in the series before starring in his own spinoff, also penned a tribute Saturday morning. “There are people you work with and then there are people you share time with. Nick was the latter,” he wrote on Instagram with a throwback photo of them together. “Some moments stay small on paper, a laugh between takes, a look that says we got this, the quiet understanding of showing up and doing the work together. But those are the things that last.”
He continued, “He carried something real, not perfect, not polished, just real. And in this business, that matters more than most things. We don’t always get to choose how long someone stays in the story, only that they were here. And he was …Rest easy Brother. Some people leave a mark without trying.”
Alyson Hannigan, who starred alongside Brendon in all seven seasons of Buffy, penned a heartfelt tribute on Instagram Friday. “My Sweet Nicky, thank you for years of laughter, love and Dodgers. I will think of you every time I see a rocking chair. I love you. RIP,” she wrote under a photo of them both.
Emma Caulfield Ford, who joined during the show’s third installment and portrayed Scooby gang member Anya Jenkins, took to her Instagram Stories on Friday night, writing, “My heart is so heavy. I can’t put into words just yet how this has hit me.” She shared a clip of Brendon on the series, adding, “Let this clip of us giving it our all be a place holder. Rest Nicky. Rest. I love you.”
Brendon’s death comes a little over a year after his Buffy co-star Michelle Trachtenberg passed away at age 39.
Growing up in Toronto, Maggie Kang felt she needed to conceal her obsession with H.O.T., the mid-1990s idol group whose tightly synchronized choreography, chantable hooks and lurid crimson hair — sometimes topped with ski goggles — helped define the template for modern K-pop.
“I had to hide that I liked K-pop,” says Kang, co-writer and co-director of KPop Demon Hunters. “Even my Asian friends thought it was lame. But it was just part of me — it wasn’t escapism, it was identity.”
These days, Kang no longer is hiding. On March 15, her hyperkinetic animated Netflix hit — in which a K-pop girl group, Huntrix, juggles global superstardom while slaying soul-eating demons disguised as a rival boy band — made history by winning best animated feature at the Academy Awards. Its self-affirmation anthem, “Golden,” currently being belted by 10-year-olds and their parents from Los Angeles to Osaka, became the first tune by a K-pop act ever to win best original song.
Accepting the award, Kang tearfully apologized that it took so long “for those of you who look like me” to see themselves represented in such a film.
It wasn’t the Academy’s first encounter with K-culture — Parasite won best picture six years ago — but Sunday’s wins felt different, as if a wave that had been building for years had finally crested. Korean culture has been filling stadiums, with BTS and Blackpink drawing crowds once reserved for Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. Industry analysts put K-pop net export revenue — including album sales, touring receipts, streaming royalties — at an estimated $1.8 billion in 2025.
It has invaded the living room, as well, with Squid Game among the most watched series in Netflix history, and the dining room, too, with Korean restaurants expanding rapidly — a 10 percent growth in their numbers in just 2024 alone — amid surging demand for Korean fried chicken. It’s even reached the freezer aisle at Costco — where shoppers have repeatedly exhausted supplies of frozen kimbap — and now features prominently at beauty store counters, where an army of Gen Z consumers slather on Korean creams and serums infused with snail mucin, rice water and bee venom.
Tae Ju Kang and Minha Kim in Pachinko.
Apple TV+
All of which raises a glaring question: How did South Korea — a middle power of some 52 million people, a nation still emerging from a century of colonization, war and military dictatorship as recently as the 1980s — manage to pull it off? How did this modest peninsula nation end up with such a colossal cultural footprint in America?
The answer, it turns out, is complicated, involving almost as many moving parts as an intricately choreographed Seventeen dance number.
Korea Had a Long Game
The Korean Wave didn’t just happen. It was engineered over decades.
In the 1990s, a South Korean presidential advisory report helped shape the course of Korean industrial history: included in its pages was the note that Jurassic Park had generated revenue roughly equivalent to the export value of 1.5 million Hyundai cars. The statistic galvanized South Korea’s industrial planners. Their country had already conquered global markets with electronics and automobiles. Why not stories?
What followed was a deliberate government-backed push to build a cultural export industry. State subsidies for filmmakers and reinforced screen quotas shielded local cinema from Hollywood dominance while constructing the infrastructure for an industry capable of projecting Korean stories internationally.
Into this ecosystem stepped Miky Lee, the granddaughter of Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul and now the vice chairwoman of CJ Group, South Korea’s largest entertainment conglomerate. With a Harvard master’s degree and the poise of an old-school Hollywood star, Lee moved easily between Seoul boardrooms and Cannes red carpets, earning the nickname “The Godmother.” Others called her the chief architect of K-culture’s American ascent.
In 1994, Lee was working as director at Samsung Electronics America when a lawyer called with a proposition: Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg were looking for backers for a new studio. She brought the proposal to her uncle, Samsung Group chair Lee Kun-hee — but Samsung walked away from a dinner at Spielberg’s house, unwilling to back a venture it couldn’t control. According to accounts of the meeting, Spielberg reportedly noted that Lee had been the only one in the room interested in art rather than semiconductors.
DreamWorks, impressed, came back to her directly. By then, CJ, which had gained operational independence from Samsung in 1993, was charting a new course as a “lifestyle and culture” group. Lee took the deal to her brother Jay Lee, who ran the company, and the two flew to Los Angeles. Over pizza at Spielberg’s studio, clad in jeans, T-shirts and sneakers, they committed $300 million for a 10.8 percent stake and Asian distribution rights. Katzenberg would later say there were two people without whom DreamWorks would not exist: Paul Allen and Miky Lee.
The investment proved pivotal — and not just financially. Back in Seoul, Lee used the DreamWorks partnership as a master class, helping to build Korea’s modern film infrastructure from the ground up: multiplexes, studios, distribution networks. Directors like Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook had a platform at home to hone their craft before finding global audiences. Korea’s contemporary film industry, in other words, was built on a pizza deal.
“When Parasite went to Cannes, it was like, ‘Wait, Koreans make movies the world wants to see?’ ” says Soo Hugh, showrunner of Pachinko, the Apple TV+ epic about a Korean family’s journey across three generations. “Miky Lee opened Hollywood’s eyes to the fact that Korean culture was worth money.”
Lee, an executive producer of Parasite, has described the 2020 Oscars — when the film became the first non-English-language picture ever to win best picture — as an “impossible dream.” The film grossed $53 million at the U.S. box office and in June topped The New York Times’ ranking of the century’s best films. Weeks before the Oscars, Bong accepted the Golden Globe for best foreign language film and delivered a line that became its own cultural touchstone: “Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”
2019’s Parasite
The Right Content. The Right Pipeline.
K-culture’s global breakout required two things happening at once: a production culture disciplined enough to make stories that could travel and a distribution platform with the scale to send them everywhere simultaneously.
Netflix provided the latter. Over the course of the past decade, the streamer shifted from licensing third-party shows to producing local-language originals — and its simultaneous global releases gave hits like Squid Game and Demon Hunters, which has surpassed 540 million views, audiences far beyond Korea’s borders. A 2024 CivicScience survey found that 56 percent of Gen Z and younger millennials prefer to watch content in its original language — a generation saturated by algorithmically engineered sameness hungers for something that feels genuinely different, even if that means braving subtitles.
But Netflix could only work with the narratives Korean creators gave it. And what they gave it stood out partly, argues Daniel Armand Lee — better known as Tablo, the Korean Canadian leader of Epik High and a pioneer of Korean hip-hop — because they had no choice. Working without Hollywood’s franchise infrastructure or Marvel-scale production budgets, Korean artists couldn’t paper over a weak story with expensive spectacle. “We didn’t have the luxury of throwing money at a problem,” he says. What they had instead was craft — and they got very good at it.
James Shin, president of film and TV at HYBE America, the U.S. arm of the entertainment company behind K-pop sensations BTS, Seventeen and Le Sserafim — and a producer on an upcoming, still-untitled Paramount K-pop film — sees that discipline baked into the Korean production system itself. “These lightning-in-a-bottle moments keep happening,” he says. “Unlike Hollywood’s endless ‘development hell,’ Korean projects are built for completion, with room for last-minute creative shifts.”
The Fans Became the Strategy
In America, the entertainment industry has always worked one way: Make the thing, then find the audience. K-pop inverted that model entirely. With BTS, the seven-member group trained under Korea’s hyper-structured idol system, the fans weren’t a byproduct — they were part of the product, actively shaping it through voting, streaming campaigns and social media mobilization that fed directly back into creative and commercial decisions.
Shin notes that BTS, which fused hip-hop, R&B and EDM with distinctly Korean storytelling, created the template for K-culture’s rise by pioneering a fan-engagement model that extended Korea’s cultural footprint across music, fashion and social media. Fans became zealous cultural foot soldiers, streaming, voting and building global communities on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. During BTS’ 2019 Love Yourself World Tour — at the time, the highest-grossing North American tour ever by an Asian act— U.S. stans flooded social media with coordinated campaigns, line-danced outside arenas and transformed hotel suites into pop-up shrines.
Artists across the industry credit BTS with a canny international strategy that expanded K-culture’s global sway. The group‘s strategic release of English-language singles starting in 2020 was key to its international success, dissolving the language barrier before American audiences even noticed it. Eric Nam, who stars in the upcoming Paramount K-pop drama alongside Ji-young Yoo, suggests that K-pop’s intricately synchronized choreography has been equally decisive. “One Direction didn’t dance. Justin Bieber didn’t dance. Korea, by contrast, doubled down: ‘We know this works. We’re going to make it incredible.’ ” And Kevin Woo, the K-pop veteran who provided the singing voice for Demon Hunters’ Mystery, notes that the softer, more emotionally expressive masculinity often associated with K-pop boy bands — “really elaborate costumes and hair and makeup,” he describes it — also resonates with female fans on both sides of the Pacific.
BTS
Hybe
The BTS template now extends beyond music. Demon Hunters was launched more like an idol debut than a conventional animated film. Netflix staged sing-along screenings in more than 1,700 theaters throughout the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, where audiences sang tracks like “Golden,” waved light sticks and arrived dressed as characters.
Meanwhile, members of Blackpink have helped expand K-pop’s scope, projecting Korea’s already glittering brand onto Paris runways, acting as brand ambassadors for Chanel and Dior and helping K-pop evolve in the American imagination from a niche boy-band phenomenon into a broader cultural engine.
Han: Korea’s Secret Weapon
There’s a word Koreans use that has no real English equivalent: han. Roughly translated, it’s a profound, marrow-deep sorrow — a collective wound rooted in a century of colonization, war and division that never quite heals. It permeates Korean storytelling: the unresolved endings, the flawed heroes, the villains you can’t quite hate, the sense that the system will probably win. It is, in other words, the opposite of a Hollywood ending.
And right now, American audiences can’t get enough of that fallibility. After decades of algorithmically optimized uplift, superhero franchises and stories where good reliably triumphs over evil, something has shifted. In a polarized country grappling with inequality, institutional failure and collective anxiety, the emotional honesty of Korean narratives — messy, painful, darkly funny, unresolved — feels less like foreign cinema than like recognition. You can see it in the class warfare of Parasite, the dystopian dread of Squid Game, the simmering immigrant rage of Beef, Lee Sung Jin’s Emmy-winning Netflix thriller. Han, it turns out, travels.
Soo Hugh knows han from the inside. Her grandmother, who lived through the Korean War and its aftermath, recounted that her family was so poor that they boiled rocks to make stone soup. “All Koreans carry these dark stories,” Hugh says. “But my grandmother told them laughing.” That combination — genuine suffering refracted through dark humor, hardship worn lightly — is exactly what American audiences are finding so alluring in Korean stories right now.
“I don’t think people realize how newly modern Korea is,” Hugh says. “K-dramas began as escapism — necessary escapism.”
Kang felt it too, shaping Demon Hunters from her own inherited han. Her father fled North Korea, and she grew up in Toronto carrying the divided inheritance that marks so many Korean families. “I think han is just something you inherit as a Korean person,” she says. “My dad’s side of the family is North Korean, so I feel very much part of this sorrow of a country that is divided. That’s something I thought about when writing the story — somebody who is split, with two sides that want to exist together, but it’s really hard.”
Arden Cho, who voices Rumi, the purple-haired half-demon, half-demon hunter grappling with her divided identities in Demon Hunters, observes that Korean storytelling resonates because it embraces a messy world that gleefully defies the binary moral codes of traditional Hollywood. The animated pop stars of the film are not idealized “Disney princesses” but flawed idols who slurp ramen, burp, cry, doubt themselves and have bad hair days.
The Jump Rope game in season three of Squid Game.
Netflix
For Many Korean Creators, Hollywood Was Already Home
Part of what has made K-culture’s American breakthrough so seamless is that so much of it is now made by Americans — Korean Americans who grew up with a foot in both worlds and the instincts to navigate between them. Demon Hunters was co-written and directed by a Canadian Korean woman raised on H.O.T. Pachinko’s showrunner grew up in suburban Maryland rewinding K-drama cassettes in her mother’s video shop.
“The gap between Seoul and L.A. is gone,” says Shin. “Now it’s ‘made with Korea,’ not ‘made for Korea.’ ”
Their projects do not overexplain Korea to Americans but trust audiences to inhabit both cultural spaces at once. Kang noted that Demon Hunters’ visual style was consciously shaped by her lifelong love of anime and manhwa — Korean comics and graphic novels — and executed with careful attention to Korean linguistic and cultural nuances, even though the film’s lingua franca is American English.
“We worked really hard on the details,” she says. “Even the way the mouth shapes move — I wanted it to feel like Korean was coming out of their mouths even though they’re speaking English.”
The opening credits of Pachinko embody this cultural synthesis: characters dance in a pachinko parlor to the 1960s American pop anthem “Let’s Live for Today” — immigrant striving projected through an unmistakably American pop tableau. Beef does something similar, translating immigrant frustration into the visual vocabulary of an American thriller, animated by distinctly Korean notions of family honor, shame, resentment and parental pressure.
But Will It Last?
The ultimate measure of K-culture’s conquest may be this: Hollywood has stopped trying to compete and started trying to join. CJ, later known as CJ Group, helped build the infrastructure for Korean cinema three decades ago and is now a fixture at the Hollywood deal table. Korean directors, writers and producers no longer are supplicants at the gate — they’re partners.
The question now isn’t whether K-culture has arrived. It’s whether the machinery that made it so effective — the scrappy production discipline, the emotional authenticity, the genuine creative hunger — can survive its own success. As K-pop spurs franchises, copycat spinoffs and big studio blockbusters, the system that propelled K-culture’s rise could stumble if its authenticity starts to waver. And even if it doesn’t, K-culture fatigue and oversaturation could prove to be a challenge.
Arden Cho, for one, isn’t worried. Her upcoming psychological thriller Perfect Girl features nine Asian and Asian American female leads spanning three generations — flesh-and-blood actors this time, not animated heroines. “I hope that we continue to create more dynamic stories that are bold and don’t shy away from who we are,” she says.
As for Maggie Kang — she accepted an Oscar on Sunday night. It’s a long way from hiding H.O.T. albums in Toronto.
ABC and Warner Horizon, the network and studio behind The Bachelor franchise, knew about Taylor Frankie Paul‘s guilty plea on a 2023 assault charge when they hired her to lead season 22 of The Bachelorette. The incident involving her ex-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen was, after all, a story point in the very first episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, the Hulu reality show that brought Paul and her fellow “MomTok” influencers a much larger degree of fame than they previously had on social media.
The case initially carried charges of domestic violence in the presence of a child and misdemeanor child abuse, both of which were dropped in exchange for Paul’s guilty plea to aggravated assault. News reports from the time indicate that police saw video footage of the altercation and that it showed Paul’s then-5-year-old daughter was struck when she threw a metal chair at Mortensen.
But until Thursday, when TMZ published the video, ABC was going full steam ahead in promoting Paul and The Bachelorette. A preview of the season aired after the Oscars and drew more than 5 million viewers, a good sign for a show coming off both a long break and, before that, its two least watched seasons on record. It raises the question: Had the video not become public, would ABC and Warner Horizon have gone ahead with the season instead of shelving it?
The sad answer to that is probably yes. Even in the sometimes squalid world of reality TV, the Bachelor franchise seems more prone to unseemly revelations about the people involved in it than just about any other show. Yet the shows have done the TV equivalent of posting through it, making gestures of concern toward cleaning up their acts while cynically leveraging the drama surrounding the franchise’s small and large scandals to rev up interest and drive viewers to their screens.
But if it took a video of a child being injured to pull the show from TV, then the Bachelor franchise is beyond help. It’s time for it to go away.
The list of scandals around the franchise is long, both in front of and behind the camera. Several Bachelor in Paradise castmembers have been booted from the show after behavior ranging from overly aggressive drunkenness to alleged sexual misconduct. Bachelor and Bachelorette contestants have said, posted or liked racist and homophobic things. Long-time host Chris Harrison was dropped from the franchise after downplaying one of those incidents in an interview with Rachel Lindsay — the first Black Bachelorette. Inaugural Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner’s story was not nearly as warm and fuzzy as the show presented it.
After most of those incidents, ABC and Warners have vowed to do a better job vetting contestants and tightening up other procedures before cameras rolled and supporting their newly famous alumni afterward. Yet the same issues keep popping up, and network and studio each keep insisting the responsibility falls with the other to make things better.
Maybe that’s because things behind the scenes were reportedly toxic as well. The franchise itself has long been criticized for the lack of diversity in its cast (particularly among the leads). Series creator Mike Fleiss left the show in 2023, and shortly afterward it was revealed that he had been the subject of an HR investigation at Warner Bros. into allegations of bullying and racial discrimination. Two years later, his replacements as showrunners on The Bachelor, Claire Freeland and Bennett Graebner, left the franchise after allegations that they created a hostile workplace environment on the show.
The toxicity around the franchise has largely been played on screen as “shocking revelations,” to crib the show’s overwrought narrative language, helping fuel the content machine the Bachelor-verse has become. It is bone-deep at this point, and the constant ginning up of drama is no longer working. The two main shows in the franchise, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, have drawn their smallest audiences ever in the past couple of seasons.
And yes, network TV as a whole is declining — but it’s not hard to find success stories. Just within ABC’s unscripted lineup, Dancing With the Stars (which featured two of Paul’s Mormon Wives co-stars, Whitney Leavitt and Jen Affleck) had its best season in years in the fall. American Idol is up so far this season too. Paul’s casting and notoriety was seen as a chance for The Bachelorette to reverse its recent ratings slump and re-establish the show after the off-camera controversy derailed the planned 2025 edition of the show.
But again, ABC and Warners knew about Paul’s guilty plea and, presumably, all the details surrounding it long before the video became public Thursday, and long before filming, editing and promoting an entire season centered on her. Disney’s statement mentioned it would focus on “supporting [Paul’s] family,” which reads as hollow — all the moreso because a few words before that, the company said it wouldn’t air The Bachelorette “at this time,” suggesting there will be a time that the season sees the light of day.
The bloom is off the rose. ABC and the Bachelor franchise need a divorce.
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Two heritage brands, both icons in their respective corners of the fashion universe, have rejoined forces following the near-instant sellout of their previous collaborative sneaker. Swarovski has, once again, reimagined a Nike staple, this time, the Air Jordan 1 High OG.
Available online at Nike.com on Saturday, March 21 at 7 a.m. PT/10 a.m. ET, the limited-edition Swarovski x Nike Air Jordan 1 High OG sees the best-selling sneaker decked out in clusters of multi-sized silver Swarovski crystals. And while the price tag is $1,005, if history is any indication, there’s no doubt the shoes will sell out almost immediately upon launch.
In addition to these classic kicks in the Vast Grey colorway, Nike and Swarovski are including a charm bracelet with every purchase, along with three dust bags: one for each shoe and one for the bracelet.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” sequel “The Testaments,” based on a 2019 novel by Margaret Atwood, is expanding the Gilead universe.
“It was very exciting to see this other side of Gilead, with all these privileged people. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ was about those at the very bottom of the social structure. Here are the women who are at the absolute top. And it still kind of sucks,” said creator Bruce Miller at French fest Series Mania after the show’s world premiere.
Set in Aunt Lydia’s elite preparatory school for future wives, the show follows the daughters of Commanders, many of whom have been taken away from their birth parents, and so-called Pearl Girls, recruited from outside Gilead.
“As Bruce said, it’s a different world entirely. And Lydia is a different person,” said Ann Dowd, who won an Emmy for her role. Her character emerges from a “very crushed place” at the end of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
“She was brought to her knees, literally, in deep and profound remorse. When that happens, you can say: ‘I don’t care. I will keep doing what I’m doing.’ Or you can change the way you see the world, acknowledge what you have done, live with the pain and the misery of that, and begin a new life.”
“I remember those early scripts and how clear they were about who Lydia is. I was raised in a Catholic home and educated by Catholic sisters. They weren’t unkind, but you learn that you’re not special. You have a job to do, so don’t look for attention. Don’t walk away before it’s complete. Get it done.”
Although the environment Aunt Lydia creates for her students comes with “less pain and suffering,” Gilead’s rules are still strict.
“I don’t know if [the current political situation] makes the story more relevant today than at any other time, but the interesting thing about Margaret Atwood is that she puts her finger on the points of friction that exist forever,” noted Miller, who first discovered her work in college.
“That was a long, long, long time ago, and it seemed like the right time to read that book. Then, 25 or 30 years later, I made the show and it still seemed as if ait was built for that time. It’s the same with ‘The Testaments.’ I think it’s more of a reflection on Margaret’s sense of where women are and what things they’re always fighting.”
He added: “As Margaret says, you can look back on any point in history and find horrible things being done to women. But I think having her write ‘The Testaments’ and say there’s hope in Gilead, is really her way of saying there’s hope for women in general. Women will move forward.”
Joining Ann Dowd are Chase Infiniti, acclaimed for her turn in Oscar-winning “One Battle After Another” as the daughter of Tayana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills, and Lucy Halliday. As Agnes and Daisy, they form an unexpected friendship.
Chase Infiniti in ‘The Testaments’
Disney
“We were very grateful to have Ann, [producer] Warren Littlefield, Bruce and also Elizabeth Moss, who’s an executive producer, as our encyclopedias for everything. We could ask them any question we had about Gilead. On top of that, they welcomed us into the world with such love and support,” said Infiniti, who “fell in love” with the script.
“It was so intriguing, and so different from Willa and ‘One Battle’. I thought I would have a hard time with the source material – it’s incredibly heavy. But because of the community that was built on set, anytime I struggled, they were there to catch me.”
According to Halliday, they both felt a “weight of responsibility.”
“‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ was so beloved. It really resonated with audiences, and the books were so brilliant. When you step into it, you want to do it justice. You don’t want to be the cog in the machine that disrupts what already existed.”
Miller also praised Mike Barber, “The Handmaid’s Tale” veteran who directed the first three episodes.
“No one knows ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ better than Barber. He also knew what things he would like to do differently and what he could do with a younger cast. He was amazing at building the world.”
Ultimately though, it’s all about Margaret Atwood.
“Margaret’s very involved in the show, and she’s busier than all of you put together. She’s the busiest 86-year-old I’ve ever met! From the beginning, she was more used to her work getting adapted than I was adapting her work. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ was a play, an opera, a ballet, and a movie. She was very loose with it and I was a little stricter,” he recalled.
She still gets every script and watches every episode.
“She’s the first person I talk to – even before the studio, before Warren. She has to say: ‘Ok, that makes sense.’ When you see her eyes light up, you know you really got something.”
Warren Littlefield added: “Every time we’ve spoken to Margaret, we’ve learned something about the world we live in. We always felt just a little bit smarter.”
“The Testaments” also expands the color palette of the show, with young female students dressed in pink and purple, and with white reserved for the Pearl Girls.
“Margaret and I talked about it a lot. We had all these new characters and we wanted to underline they were still cloaked by Gilead. They were still categorized by Gilead, but they were different women,” said Miller.
“We had discussions about shorts sleeves, tons of discussions about the length of skirts and how much skin you could show. It got weird. You start feeling like you’re naked when you’re wearing your regular clothes, because it’s so restrictive.”
Littlefield observed: “The red robe from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is so iconic. It has been used as a symbol around the world, and it has made us tremendously proud. But you won’t find it in ‘The Testaments.’ That’s part of us saying: This is a new world.”
“Bruce and I had a wonderful experience watching June [played by Elisabeth Moss] come to life. We saw her on the monitor, and we said: ‘I think this is going to work.’ Now, all these years later, we were on the set of ‘The Testaments,’ looking at the monitor and watching Chase as Agnes. It was history repeating itself.”
Elon Musk artificially drove down the price of Twitter‘s stock in 2022 with tweets claiming the social-media company — which he had already agreed to acquire — had underreported how many fake and spam accounts were on its platform, a federal jury found.
The verdict was handed down Friday in a civil trial in California against Musk brought on behalf of Twitter shareholders, in a lawsuit alleging that Musk was attempting to back out of his agreement to buy Twitter or negotiate a lower price. The jury found that Musk’s tweets in 2022 — saying he was suspending his takeover of Twitter (citing his skepticism about Twitter’s claims that spam and bot accounts were less than 5% of the total) — were materially false or misleading. However, the jury also found that Musk was not liable for “engaging in a scheme to defraud investors.”
Musk’s legal team at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan said in a statement, “We view today’s verdict, where the jury found both for and against the plaintiffs and found no fraud scheme, as a bump in the road. And we look forward to vindication on appeal.”
Francis Bottini, a lawyer representing shareholders in the class-action suit, estimated that damages Musk will be required to pay in the matter could run to about $2.5 billion, Reuters reported. “Musk’s status as the world’s richest man is not a free pass,” Bottini said in a statement. “If you’re able to move markets with your tweets you’re responsible for the harm you cause to investors.”
Musk, 54, is the wealthiest individual in the world with a net worth currently estimated at $814 billion, per Forbes.
The jury found two of Musk’s tweets misleading. On May 13, 2022, he wrote, “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.” In the other one, which came four days later on May 17, Musk claimed without providing evidence that Twitter’s user base could represent “20% fake/spam accounts” and that it “could be *much* higher”; he said “This deal cannot move forward” until Twitter’s then-CEO provided proof of the sub-5% claim. During the trial, Musk’s attorneys had defended those tweets as representing his legitimate concerns about Twitter’s spam/bot issues and argued that they weren’t a scheme to depress the company’s stock price.
Shortly before the deal closed, Musk said that he and other investors were “obviously overpaying for Twitter right now.” Musk had agreed to buy Twitter for $54.20/share in April 2022, then spent several months trying to back out of the pact. After Twitter sued Musk, seeking to enforce the original terms of the merger agreement, he ultimately agreed to complete the deal at the original purchase price.
Separately, Musk is in talks to settle an SEC lawsuit accusing him of failing to properly disclose his initial purchases of Twitter in early 2022, per a court filing by the agency this week. The SEC’s suit alleged Musk’s undisclosed stock purchases cost other Twitter shareholders at least $150 million because they sold shares at lower prices without knowing that Musk was amassing shares in the company.
Last month, Musk’s SpaceX bought his artificial-intelligence company, xAI, which had previously acquired X. The transaction — valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion — is the largest merger of all time, valuing SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion, per CNBC.
The ex-wife of German actor and comedian Christian Ulmen has filed a criminal complaint accusing the Berlin Blues star of creating and decimating fake sex videos and nude photos of her online.
Collien Fernandes, a well-known German actress and TV presenter, made her allegations public in an Instagram post on Friday, detailing what she alleges was a decade of systematic “humiliation” by Ulmen.
She accuses Ulmen of creating AI-generated photos and videos of her that he spread online and sent to other men in the German film and TV industry. One fake video, which she claims was sent to 21 men, depicted her being gang-raped. Ulmen, Fernandes alleges, also used AI to clone her voice for the purpose of fake telephone sex chats with other men.
Ulmen, through his lawyer, had denied all charges.
In an in-depth investigation, published in German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, Fernandes alleges that her ex-husband created fake social media profiles in her name and used them to contact men to send them pornographic photos and videos.
A media law firm, commissioned by Ulmen, has called the Spiegel report “unlawful for several reasons” and that it disseminated “untrue facts” based on a “one-sided account.”
Fernandes had been aware of the spread of the digital fakes for years. In 2024 she hosted a TV program, “The Hunt for the Perpetrator” which tried to find the people behind her fake social media profiles. Last year, she claims, she discovered her husband was behind it all.
Fernandes and Ulmen married in 2012. They separated last year and announced their divorce earlier this month. They have a daughter.
The criminal complaint, filed in Spain, where the couple have a second residence, accuses Ulmen of, among other things, alleged identity theft, violation of business or private secrets, and public insult.
Fernandes and Ulmen were one of Germany‘s best-known celebrity couples. Ulmen has been a household name in Germany for decades, first as a MTV VJ, then as a comedian and actor on hit series including Jerks and crime procedural Tatort, and in films, including Berlin Blues (2003), and Maria, ihm schmeckt’s nicht! (2009). Fernandes is a prominent TV presenter and actress who has appeared in such German comedies as Night of the Living Dorks (2004) and Ossi’s Eleven (2007).
In response to the allegations, German commercial network Pro7 pulled all episodes of Ulmen’s Jerks from its online platform Joyn. Public broadcaster ARD not yet removed Ulmen’s Tatort episodes from its on-demand service.
To quote RM, “I need the whole stadium to jump. Put your phone down, let’s get all the fun.” Or the maybe not the whole stadium, but the whole gathered crowd at Seoul landmark Gwanghwamun, which has been outfitted for the grand return of the groundbreaking K-pop group, BTS.
Fresh off the release of their fifth studio album, Arirang, the seven members of BTS — RM, Jin, Suga, J-hope, Jimin, V and Jungkook — kicked off their first group live performance in over three years, BTS The Comeback Live | Arirang, Saturday night in Seoul. The concert special, which was broadcast live around the world on Netflix, had been highly anticipated.
Starting with a sweeping shot of Seoul’s Joseon-era Gyeongbokgung Palace, the live stream kicked off eventually revealed the seven men of BTS standing in front of the palace. “Hello, Seoul,” the group’s leader RM told the crowd. “We’re back.”
The show kicked right into “Body to Body,” which ended with a group of performers in traditional Korean hanbok, playing the Korean folk song “Arirang.” They then jumped into new songs “Hooligan” and “2.0.” BTS then introduced themselves to the gathered crowd. “We are finally here, and we are seeing you again,” Jimin, 30, told the crowd. “The fact that I’m speaking here, I am so moved.”
BTS continued through the show playing some non-Arirang hits like “Butter” and “MIC Drop” before singing “Aliens,” “FYA,” their new single “Swim,” “Like Animals” and “Normal.”
“BTS 2.0 is just getting started,” J-hope, 32, told the crowd after singing “Normal.” His group member Jin, the eldest at 33, added, “Thank you for waiting, ARMY.”
The K-pop superstars closed out the night with their smash hit “Dynamite” and the fan favorite “소우주” — known as “Mikrokosmos” in English. The melodic track had the crowd energized and swaying along with the pop group.
‘BTS The Comeback Live | Arirang’ in Seoul.
BigHit Music/Netflix
While the entire group performed, RM, was said limited in his participation due to an ankle injury he suffered during rehearsals for the show, the band’s label BigHit Music announced Friday. The label said RM suffered a serious-sounding ankle injury while practicing with his bandmates on Thursday. The rapper, however, was mobile throughout the show despite his injury, using a stool at the front of the stage as his home base for the performance.
“Although there will be limitations to his performance, RM will participate on stage to the extent possible and hopes to connect with ARMY and the audience,” a statement released Friday read. “As many have waited a long time for this performance, he will do his utmost to deliver his best.”
The live stream, unsurprisingly, let the viewers at home hear the men of Bangtan Sonyeondan crystal clear, however, the in-person quality was also notably crisp. The sound at the square was truly impressive, their voices booming and echoing throughout the square.
Arirang, the group’s first album in nearly four years, served as the official return to the global stage for the boy group, who spent their years away releasing solo music and completing their mandatory military service in their home country of South Korea. Fans of the group, collectively known as ARMY, have been waiting in anticipation as each member was discharged over the last year.
BTS, a trailblazer in the globalization of K-pop, has seemingly taken over their home city of Seoul to celebrate their return. The choice to stage the first performance of the album in front of Gwanghwamun, the main gate and historic entryway to Seoul’s Gyeongbokgung Palace, is no coincidence — the album is a reflection on the group’s identity. The palace was lit up with a dynamic video projection, integrating it into the stage show; the first time that’s ever been done.
The album’s name, Arirang, pays tribute the folk song of the same name, which is the first Korean song recorded by Korean men with American ethnologist Alice Fletcher in the U.S. in 1896. Motifs from “Arirang” can be heard in the first track of the album, “Body to Body.” One of the most striking tracks on the album is “No. 29,” a minute-and-38-second recording of resonant tolling of the Divine Bell of King Seongdeok, which has been designated as South Korea’s National Treasure No. 29. Arirang sends a clear message — BTS is proud of their roots. They are, and always will be, a Korean band, even if their audience has expanded to the entire world.
No pop concert has previously been held in Gwanghwamun Square, because of the site’s deep historical and political significance. Netflix and Hybe raffled off 22,000 tickets for a cordoned seating area surrounding the stage, but the streamer and label were expecting at least 260,000 people to pour into the square and its surrounding streets. After the show ended, the production was extremely cautious about getting the crowd out of the area, releasing attendees in stages to lessen any overcrowding or chaos. It was still, however, quite backed up leaving the concert area.
‘BTS The Comeback Live | Arirang’ in Seoul.
BigHit Music/Netflix
BTS The Comeback Live | Arirang marks the first-ever live stream of a standalone concert for Netflix. The production is using a jaw dropping 23 camera setup to capture the live experience for fans around the world. “It was very clear from the start that this opportunity was one we could not pass up,” Netflix’s vice president of nonfiction sports and series Brandon Riegg told press at a briefing ahead of the show.
“We view these live events as an opportunity to reach fans and members around the world in a way that is becoming increasingly tough to find: singular events that really pull people together,” Reigg continued, noting it “just doesn’t get any bigger than BTS” when speaking about the live stream. “I would venture to guess this might be the biggest thing this year that we see on Netflix in terms of our live ambition.”
Saturday’s live stream concert is being directed by live television performance pro Hamish Hamilton, known for directing several Super Bowl halftime shows, including this year’s with another global icon, Bad Bunny. “BTS is the greatest band in the world, so it’s a huge honor to be asked to direct this live show in such an iconic location,” Hamilton told press at the briefing.
“Every decision we have made in terms of camera approach, stage design and production has been built around one question: how do we make the person watching at home feel like they are standing in that square?” Hamilton said. “There are big sweeping moments that convey the full scale of what is happening in Seoul, and then there are moments of real intimacy where you are right there with the band. The millions watching around the world are every bit as much a part of this night as the people on the ground in Seoul.”
With the whole arena-style gig taking place in a busy public square, staging the concert was more like a military takeover than a typical arena show, suggested Jonathan Mussman, the streamer’s vice president of production for nonfiction and live programming.
“When you do this in a stadium, you can completely control the environment and you can take your time setting up,” Mussman said during a press walkthrough of the venue the day before the gig. “We’re really pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the live concert broadcast world.”
Whereas a typical arena rock show — like Harry Styles’ recent Netflix concert — requires a few hundred crew, Netflix and Hybe employed over 1,000 local and international production pros — not including security — to pull off Saturday night’s show.
“It really takes an army of production veterans — plus BTS ARMY, of course — to make this happen,” Mussman added.
BTS will make perform for the first time in U.S. in nearly four years this coming week. The group is slated to perform at a Spotify event Monday and the members will make their return to U.S. television later in the week, appearing on two nights of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
This story will be updated throughout the performance. More details to come.
Thirty years in, and FilMart still knows how to fill a room.
The Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre hummed with a density that attendees said felt more like the market’s pre-pandemic peak than anything seen in recent years – a buzzing, deal-hungry crowd that reflected just how much the appetite for Asian content has grown, and how many new players now want a seat at the table. From Myanmar’s first international market debut to Sri Lankan distributors comparing notes with European buyers, the 30th edition of the Hong Kong International Film & TV Market made a persuasive case that the screen business, for all its anxieties about AI and fragmentation, remains hungry for connection.
“I am meeting friends and new business partners from Turkey, the U.K., the U.S., and even Brazil,” said Timothy Oh, general manager of leading microdrama player COL International Group, a first-time FilMart participant from Singapore. “Hong Kong’s role as an international hub helps create a bustling market with many business opportunities for those looking at innovation and what’s next.”
FilMart and its co-located forum EntertainmentPulse, organized by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), drew roughly 8,000 industry professionals from 53 countries and regions, with over 790 exhibitors from a record 38 countries – including first-time participants from Belgium, Poland, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Uzbekistan.
Here are six takeaways from FilMart 2026.
1. AI Moves From Buzzword to Workflow
Artificial intelligence was the year’s dominant conversation – but the tenor has shifted. Where previous editions treated AI with theoretical enthusiasm, this year’s market found practitioners speaking in more practical, and sometimes cautious, terms.
The returning AI Hub, supported by the Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency (CCIDA) and the Film Development Fund, showcased companies including Alibaba Cloud, Kling, MiniMax and Vidu alongside academic partners from the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. The newly launched AI Academy offered 19 hands-on workshops covering generative text, audio and animation. At the Golden Rooster Roundtable, organized by the China Film Association and China Film Co-production Corp., AI was cast as a creative “partner.” Meanwhile, Mei Ah Entertainment unveiled a slate of AI-generated short dramas reimagining classic IP for mobile-first audiences, and Red Empire Productions and Organic Media Group bowed hybrid animated vertical series “Home Away AI.i.Ce.”
Yet legendary director Peter Chan Ho-sun offered a more sobering counterpoint at the Producers Connect panel. “I think we’re at the worst times. Those days of the blockbusters are gone. We’re experiencing now what I learned when I went to Hollywood in the late 90s. Nobody knows anything,” said Chan. “With the fragmented markets, with the vertical short dramas, with AI, and with cinemas closing. I think we’re at the worst times.” Chan drew a sharp line between commercial cinema and auteur work: “I don’t think AI is an enemy to auteur film. But AI would be an enemy to mediocre blockbusters. Basically, AI can replace any blockbuster or commercial film in three years, I believe.” He reserved particular scorn for the industry’s reliance on data analytics: “Big data. That’s one of the dirtiest words I’ve ever heard for creative people. A lot of these so-called big data could actually end up killing the film.”
Henry Or, SVP of strategic partnerships, Asia at Boat Rocker Studios, says the divergence in attitude between Asian and Western markets is striking. “If you look at the whole AI development from China, it is more advanced, because it’s something that the government is really leading the whole development for the industry,” he tells Variety. AI dubbing is already widespread in Chinese drama production, he notes, though he adds a caveat about its screen applicability: “China is okay, because 90% of people, they watch content on their mobile. So it’s a small screen.”
Bizhan Tong, a U.K. and Hong Kong-based filmmaker, frames AI as a force multiplying collaboration rather than diminishing it. “The use of AI has emboldened more collaborations to occur, because they see AI not as a tool for removing jobs, but one that can actually save jobs by reducing costs, and therefore enabling more productions to be made,” he says.
Quietly, the technology has spread throughout production workflows, even if few are advertising it. One director noted matter-of-factly that certain generative AI shots in his sizzle reel would be replaced with conventional VFX before release – an admission that spoke volumes about how embedded the technology has become, and how wary practitioners remain of audience or investor scrutiny.
2. China: The Gateway Is Warming, but Not Yet Wide Open
With 355 mainland Chinese companies participating at this year’s FilMart, expectations were high for distribution breakthroughs. The reality proved more complicated.
China remains a heavyweight in the global box office, its market generating approximately $7.4 billion in 2025 and maintaining its position as the world’s second-largest. Year-to-date 2026 revenue stands at roughly $1.58 billion – down 52.9% from the same period last year, in large part because of the outsized performance of “Ne Zha 2” in early 2025 – but still running some $350 million ahead of North America. Local films account for nearly 80% of ticket sales, and the audience itself is transforming: women now make up 60% of cinemagoers, over-25s represent 85% of the audience base, and emerging tier cities are posting double-digit growth.
However, China has maintained an unofficial ban on Korean content – dramas, films and K-pop performances – since 2016, when Beijing imposed the restrictions in retaliation for Seoul’s deployment of U.S. missile defense systems. Diplomatic signals of a thaw have been building: Chinese President Xi Jinping met South Korean President Lee Jae-myung in Beijing in January 2026 and suggested improvement would come gradually. But at FilMart, Korean distributors were still waiting.
Paul D. Kim, CEO of Seoul-based Hive Filmworks, says Korean distributors remain frustrated by persistent barriers. “It’s unfortunate the mainland China censorship is not lifted yet. We were hoping that we meet more Chinese distributors to be able to do the distribution of really good Korean commercial films,” he tells Variety. “We did meet some, but seems like nothing’s gonna move forward for a little longer while, so we are hoping the second half of the year we might be able to do more collaboration with China.”
Yet there are signs of gradual thawing. On the market floor, talk of loosening censorship red lines circulated, with recent mainland screenings of previously unreleased library titles in the horror genre – among them “Alien: Romulus” and “The Shining” – drawing notice as cautious indicators of a shifting content environment.
Diplomatically, the mood is more optimistic. For Tong, the biggest recent catalyst has been political: U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s visit to China, which paved the way for visa-free travel for British citizens from Lunar New Year. “I’ve had meetings where people have just reached out to me and asked me, can we quickly meet in Shenzhen or Guangzhou, and suddenly I can now do that,” he says. Tong adds that his company is currently working with China on both scripted and unscripted projects.
3. Co-productions Find New Momentum – and New Complexity
Cross-border collaboration is rising, driven partly by economics, partly by shifting audience behavior. A new generation of viewers increasingly receptive to subtitles and foreign languages has lowered cultural barriers, while tightening production budgets are making multi-territory partnerships a necessity rather than a luxury.
The Producers Connect initiative – jointly organized by the HKSAR’s Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau, the CCIDA, the Hong Kong Film Development Council and the HKTDC – brought together more than 100 producers from Hong Kong and around the world. At a panel titled “International Coproductions in an Evolving Film Industry Landscape,” producer Janet Yang observed that “the world is getting flatter, language is mattering less and less to audiences everywhere.” Chan, addressing the same session, counseled diversifying investors and partners across regions as essential strategy.
The Shanghai Broadcasting Film & TV Producers Association and the Hong Kong Screenwriters’ Guild formalized their relationship at the market, signing a memorandum of understanding covering co-production, talent cultivation and technological exchange.
Tong, who conducted meetings with partners across Asia during the event, describes the shift in atmosphere as tangible. “In contrast to two recent years, there is a more positive spirit in what we can do together. What we’re seeing is different regions looking to do more international collaborations, more co-productions, and I feel as a result of that, we should be seeing more projects getting made,” he says.
4. Microdrama Goes Global — and Gets Serious
For years, microdrama was a Chinese local story: bite-sized vertical episodes, consumed on mobile, monetized at scale, and largely invisible to Western industry. At FilMart 2026, that story acquired a new chapter.
The format has already overtaken traditional film and television in mainland China in revenue terms, and producers are now pushing hard beyond its borders. Linmon Media arrived at the market with a dedicated microdrama division built on the back of 11 titles in 2025 – 80% of which ranked in the top three in Thai and Indonesian markets – and unveiled a new vertical-format lineup tailored for broader Asian audiences. Mei Ah Entertainment, meanwhile, has been collaborating with Douyin to turn classic films into short-form dramas, using AI to generate new short-form dramas from its classic IP.
The most telling indicator of the format’s maturation, however, was structural. COL Group and Nasdaq-listed BeLive Holdings launched what they described as the world’s first “Microdrama in a Box” — a bundled offering combining cloud-based platform infrastructure with access to a curated content catalogue, designed to let broadcasters, mobile operators and streaming services in emerging markets deploy a branded microdrama platform within 30 days. The proposition is aimed squarely at markets where appetite for the format is growing but the building blocks – content libraries, platform technology and operational know-how – remain out of reach.
EntertainmentPulse dedicated a full session to the format, with speakers from Chinese companies including DataEye, Mansen Culture Media and Xiaowu Brothers dissecting both the production economics and the business models driving expansion. The consensus: microdrama is no longer an experiment. It is an industry.
5. Southeast Asia and New Voices Step Forward
The market’s geographic footprint continues to widen, with Southeast Asia and a wave of emerging-market first-timers asserting themselves with growing confidence.
Myanmar production company aTwentyThree used FilMart as its first international market outing, with founder Arker Soe Oo connecting with distributors from the U.S. and Europe. Sri Lanka’s Mogo Studios, another first-time exhibitor, said the market exceeded expectations.
Filipino producer Wilfredo Manalang of Fusee found the event energizing, particularly around content trends in the region. “There’s a lot of interest in BL [Boys’ Love] stories and BL kind of content from different Southeast Asian countries,” he tells Variety, noting that he also encountered companies actively interested in Filipino content more broadly.
Liuying Cao of Parallax Films China says FilMart proved far more productive than the Berlin European Film Market, attributing the shift to economic conditions that are driving more Asian buyers toward regional events. “FilMart has been quite busy for us – we had almost three and a half days of meetings nonstop. We got some oral offers already through the meetings, and we’re expecting more deals to be done after FilMart ends,” she says.
Her wish list for next year is a more geographically diverse buyer pool. “At the moment, our key buyers come from Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea – very traditionally strong markets. But from other territories, we still got less interest,” she says. “So we hope next year this can be a little bit different.”
6. A Market in Motion – and in Transition
FilMart 2026 felt noticeably busier than recent editions – and more visibly weighted toward Chinese-language content. Panels and presentations were markedly less likely to offer simultaneous translations into English than in previous years, a shift that several English-speaking attendees remarked upon, and which some attributed to budget pressures or evolving trade relations.
Henry Or, who has worked in the film and television industry for three decades, says the market’s identity is evolving alongside the industry it serves. “In Hong Kong, when it was a very good time, we had around like over 100 movies a year. But now, maybe less than 20,” he says. “People may be going less to the cinema because there are a lot more other entertainment for people to watch on different devices.” He argues that FilMart’s future lies in content beyond film: “FilMart is really just the name, but there will be more than just movies in this venue here, because this is where you can really connect yourself to China and to the East as well.”
Ronan Wong, COO and co-founder of AR Asia Production, says the expansion into new formats is creating tangible energy. “We feel the vibe in the different format of content – not only movie, TV, AI format, and also vertical drama is heavily discussed this time,” he says. “Cross-industry cooperation and also using the new technology – we feel fear sometimes, but actually, when we see the result and we use it, we feel it’s a strong tool to improve our efficiencies, and also in terms of costing and monetization.” He is also looking ahead to greater crossover between brands and entertainment content, citing conversations that emerged at EntertainmentPulse’s Marketing Pulse event as particularly promising.
For Paul D. Kim, the market’s overall value holds even as its character changes. “The more efficient people are narrowed down to stay in the market,” he says. “So still productive.”
One notable shift was the reduced presence of European buyers and delegates – a gap that the Middle East conflict goes some way to explaining. Airspace closures across the Gulf region from late February, triggered by military strikes on Iran, forced carriers to reroute Europe-Asia flights around the conflict zone, adding hours to journey times and sending airfares soaring. “People from Europe – I’m not sure if it’s the effect of the war. Before, there were people walking around, you see them everywhere. But now it seems like it’s very Asian-centric in terms of a market,” said Manalang.
Meanwhile, despite Japan’s ongoing diplomatic tensions with China, 37 Japanese companies attended FilMart. At the concurrent Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum, Japan debuted a dedicated Film Frontier section, placing seven Japanese projects across HAF’s strands in a clear signal that Unijapan is pursuing an outward-facing strategy regardless of bilateral headwinds. Japanese projects were among HAF winners.
Hong Kong’s own screen industry provided a reminder of what the city still does best. The flashy launch of “Cold War 1994,” an ensemble period thriller featuring Chow Yun-fat, Aaron Kwok, Tony Leung Ka-fai and Louis Koo, the announcement of a sequel to “Twilight of the Warriors” and a peek at upcoming series “The Season,” generated considerable buzz on the market floor – proof that Hong Kong content, even in a contracted state, retains its capacity to electrify.
