When South Korea’s pandemic-hit film industry seemed cornered by falling box-office sales and soaring budgets, an unexpected revival arrived through technology.
Bloomberg reports that King of Kings—a modestly budgeted animated film produced by Seoul-based Mofac Studios—defied all odds to become a global success.
Released in the US around Easter, the movie grossed $60 million at the American box office and is now set to surpass $100 million worldwide by Christmas.
What makes its triumph remarkable isn’t just its earnings, but how artificial intelligence is reshaping the production process and levelling the playing field for smaller studios.
AI-powered filmmaking aims to cut time and cost
Mofac Studios, led by veteran visual-effects director Jang Seong-ho, produced King of Kings—an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ The Life of Our Lord—for just $25 million, a fraction of typical Hollywood budgets.
The film’s English-language voice cast included Kenneth Branagh, Oscar Isaac, and Uma Thurman, which helped it capture global attention and outperform Parasite as South Korea’s most successful release in the US.
Now, Mofac is turning its attention to AI. Backed by 6 billion won in funding from Altos Ventures, the studio is building in-house servers and developing AI-assisted production tools using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.
The goal is to halve production time and costs by automating visual design, rendering, and scene generation—allowing one or two people to achieve what once required hundreds.
Korea’s studios race to adopt AI amid slow recovery
The shift toward AI is spreading quickly across the South Korean film industry, which has faced one of the weakest recoveries since the pandemic.
The number of new film releases has dropped by more than half compared with pre-Covid peaks, pushing studios to explore ways to streamline production.
Meditation with a Pencil, another Seoul-based studio, is using AI tools to remake Hong Kong’s classic A Better Tomorrow in animated form.
Galaxy Corp.—known for managing Parasite star Song Kang-ho and K-pop icon G-Dragon—is collaborating with SKAI Intelligence and Nvidia’s Omniverse platform to create AI-driven virtual characters and content.
Meanwhile, Hive Media Corp., the producer behind 12.12: The Day, is testing AI in both animation and live-action formats.
Their initiatives coincide with new government support: officials have pledged additional funding for AI-driven animation, with a dedicated fund planned to expand technology-based film projects.
Asia embraces AI as Hollywood debates its limits
While the use of AI in cinema remains controversial in the US—where ongoing debates centre on creative rights and job security—Asian filmmakers are moving faster to integrate these tools.
From OpenAI’s Sora to China’s Kuaishou Kling AI, video-generation systems that can create lifelike clips in seconds are gaining traction across the region.
For many Korean producers, the technology offers a survival strategy in a market constrained by high production costs and limited post-pandemic demand.
AI tools promise shorter workflows and reduced labour needs, creating opportunities for studios that lack Hollywood-scale funding but still aim to produce globally competitive films.
Yet concerns persist. Industry figures warn that rapid adoption could displace creative workers and alter cinema’s visual language.
According to Bloomberg, director Park Chan-wook, known for Old Boy, voiced fears during the Busan International Film Festival that automation could “take away many jobs and fundamentally change the aesthetics of film.”
A small studio’s rise signals a new balance of power
Jang’s five-person King of Kings team relied heavily on motion-capture technology, demonstrating how limited resources can still deliver blockbuster-level results.
The success suggests that future South Korean productions may depend less on scale and more on technological agility.
If Mofac achieves its goal of producing one feature film and one series each year through AI-assisted workflows, it could redefine South Korea’s position in global cinema—transforming it from an exporter of arthouse hits to a competitive producer of mainstream animated features.
The rise of King of Kings thus marks not only a box-office victory but also the beginning of an era where South Korean studios use artificial intelligence to rival the world’s biggest film industries on speed, efficiency, and creative reach.
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