Bae Suzy, Lee Byung-hun to limit acting fees to 10% to save Korean film industry

The Korean film industry has officially launched structural reforms to escape a long-term period of stagnation. Amid the triple threat of rising production costs, shrinking investment, and declining theater audiences, the first institutional agreement to improve the entrenched structure of actor fees has been established, bringing the long-standing discussion of 'normalizing the production ecosystem' to a new phase.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korean Film Council announced on the 16th that they signed an 'Agreement between Government, Production Companies, and Management Companies for the Vitalization of Korean Film Production' at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul in Jongno-gu, Seoul. This agreement saw participation from major domestic actor management companies, including BH Entertainment, Management SOOP, and J Wide Company, alongside the Korea Film Producers Association and the Korean Film Producers Association (PGK), formalizing the industry's collective will for coexistence.

The core of this agreement lies in the voluntary cooperation of production companies and actors to set the acting fees for mid-budget films receiving government support to less than 10% of the net production cost. While based on voluntary industry agreement rather than legal compulsion, it is evaluated as having significant symbolic meaning in attempting to reorganize the production cost structure more rationally.

For example, if a project with a net production cost of 5 billion KRW is selected for production support from the Korean Film Council, the acting fee for a single lead actor is recommended to be below 500 million KRW. This is not simply intended to lower actors' market values, but stems from an industrial awareness of wanting to distribute limited production budgets more efficiently toward enhancing the quality of the work, such as filming, art direction, post-production, and technical personnel.

Notably, BH Entertainment, which represents Lee Byung-hun, Han Ji Min, and Park Bo-young, joined the agreement, as did Management SOOP, home to Gong Yoo, Gong Hyo-jin, Jeon Do-yeon, and Bae Suzy, and J Wide Company, which manages Kim So Yeon, Bae Jong Ok, and Choo Young-woo. The fact that large agencies containing actors who possess both box-office power and star power expressed their intent to cooperate by empathizing with government policy is being received as a symbolic declaration for the recovery of the Korean film industry, moving beyond a mere administrative procedure.

This agreement takes place against the backdrop of the structural crisis that has shaken the film industry since COVID-19. During the pandemic, theater audiences plummeted, and since then, as OTT platforms have established themselves as the central axis of content consumption, the theater-centered investment system has significantly contracted. While production costs rose, the possibility of recovering investments decreased, resulting in mid-budget films taking the hardest hit.

In fact, criticisms have been steadily raised in the film industry that as the proportion of high acting fees for star actors becomes excessively large within production costs, the improvement of production infrastructure and treatment of staff, which determine the quality of a work, is relatively neglected. Since film production is not an industry completed by a single actor but a collective creative system where hundreds of professional personnel—including directors, cinematographers, lighting, art, sound, editing, visual effects (VFX), and music—organically combine, the balance of production cost distribution is evaluated as an issue directly linked to industrial competitiveness.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korean Film Council also plan to form a private-led voluntary consultative body so that this agreement does not end as a one-time declaration, allowing production companies, investors, distributors, and management companies to continuously discuss ways to improve the production environment. The mid-budget film production support project, which began at a scale of 10 billion KRW last year, is also being accompanied by policy support, with its scale significantly expanded to 46 billion KRW this year.

However, there are many cautious views within and outside the industry regarding the effectiveness of this agreement. It is pointed out that since the scope of the agreement is limited to mid-budget films with production costs between 2 billion and 10 billion KRW supported by the Korean Film Council, there are limits to fundamentally changing the acting fee structure of the entire industry.

Above all, most recent controversies regarding high acting fees have arisen in cases of global OTT original series with budgets in the tens of billions of KRW. Analyses continue to suggest that the intensifying capital competition between platforms has caused the market value of some star actors to surge, accelerating production cost inflation. In this environment, it remains uncertain whether this agreement, which targets only mid-budget films for theaters, can change the pricing system of the entire market.

Nevertheless, this agreement holds significance as the first social consensus for the Korean film industry to recover a sustainable production ecosystem, rather than being a simple adjustment of acting fees. Since the industry's expansion in the late 1990s, Korean films have secured global competitiveness through the growth of directors, actors, production companies, and investors; however, they now face new environmental shifts such as decreasing investment, production concentration, and a market reorganization centered on OTT.

Ultimately, this agreement is not a narrow discussion on 'reducing acting fees,' but a starting point for improving industrial structure to determine how limited production budgets can be efficiently distributed to allow more works to be produced and more diverse creators to enter the market. Whether this voluntary coexistence model will prove effective in the field, and whether this movement can expand to OTT and large-scale commercial films, will be a crucial turning point in determining the future competitiveness of Korean cinema.