A Splendid Spring, an Empty Factory
The Two Faces of K-Dramas in Q2 2025
The world is obsessed with Korean dramas, yet the factories that produce them are shutting down. In spring 2025, collapse amid abundance has officially begun.
Korean dramas in the second quarter of 2025 found themselves in a curious state of division. On the global stage, the status of K-dramas had never been stronger. As of the first half of the year, Korean content accounted for approximately 14.6% of total viewing time on Netflix—a remarkable achievement, given that no single non-English-language country’s content has consistently maintained such a high share.
However, at the same time, the domestic “factory” actually producing those dramas sounded the exact opposite alarm. Drama slots vanished from schedules one by one, production companies began pleading for subsidies, and the fee for a single actor started to determine the fate of an entire project. Behind the dazzling export statistics, the foundation of the industry was crumbling silently. This was the most acute incident that defined the spring of 2025.
The first noticeable change was that the “drama‑slot” space has shrunk. Since 2025, JTBC and ENA have eliminated their weekday drama slots, while TV Chosun, Channel A, and MBN have effectively stopped airing dramas, which they had been running irregularly. Even SBS’s Thursday drama slot disappeared during this period. In fact, only one channel—tvN—has maintained a regular mini‑series slot.
Numbers are even colder. The annual number of drama productions fell from about 140 in 2022 to roughly 120 in 2023, and is projected to drop to around 80–85 in 2024. In just two to three years, the industry’s output has nearly been cut in half.
This decline is not due to improved efficiency. Amid a sharp drop in advertising revenue, production costs have skyrocketed, leading broadcasters to conclude that rerunning old dramas is less costly than launching new ones. The fact that some KBS mini-series in the first half of 2025 recorded single-digit percentage viewership ratings, with even low single-digit figures hailed as “successful broadcasts,” vividly encapsulates this collapse.
If you trace the real reason behind the disappearance of slots, you ultimately arrive at “money.” And the largest chunk of that money is none other than the lead actor’s fee. According to data from the Content Promotion Authority, both terrestrial broadcasters (32.5%) and production companies (32.7%) reported that actor fees account for the largest share of production costs. This means a single actor takes home roughly one-third of a project’s total budget.
Concrete examples are even more shocking. Reports have surfaced one after another stating that top-tier actors’ per-episode fees reach 200–300 million won, with one actor reportedly earning 400 million won per episode for a Disney+ drama, and another actor’s total fee for a single production estimated at 9 billion won. As one broadcast industry insider candidly put it: “At these lead-actor fee levels, it’s impossible for broadcasters to recoup their investment on mini-series produced solely with their own internal funds.”
The biggest problem with this structure is the separation of risk and reward. Whether a project succeeds or fails, a top actor’s fee is paid out first like a fixed cost, while any loss falls entirely on the production company and broadcaster. As a result, the industry becomes increasingly dependent on “safe” top actors, and that dependence further drives up their fees, trapping the system in a vicious cycle.
It was ultimately global OTT platforms, especially Netflix, that propped up this deficit structure. Netflix guarantees the full production cost plus a modest margin, but in return it monopolizes the finished content’s IP (intellectual property). For producers, it’s a lifeline that averts immediate losses, yet even if a work becomes a worldwide hit, the profit ends up being the “safe subcontract” that the platform takes.
Meanwhile, domestic OTTs such as Tving and Wavve each incurred annual losses exceeding 1 trillion won, leaving them unable to shoulder production budgets on par with Netflix’s. Ultimately, the landscape of spring 2025 can be summarized as follows: Domestic broadcasters cannot produce, domestic OTTs cannot support, and only global OTTs provide funding—using IP as collateral.
A counterargument is possible. Someone might ask, “If the world is buying our content, why is this a crisis?” Yet a boom in which there’s no IP left, no diverse production entities remain, and no slots for newcomers to debut is merely a boom whose bill arrives late.
The events that defined the second quarter of 2025 were not a hit drama or a scandal. It was a structural realization that K‑dramas, at the height of their brilliance, had begun to eat away at their own production foundations. The disappearance of slots, a halving of the number of episodes produced, fees that swallowed the budget, and deals that handed over IP—all four converged within a single quarter.
It is no coincidence that the industry has revised its standard contract system—unchanged for 12 years—during this period, seeking to bring even OTT and online platform productions (not just broadcaster-produced content) under its contractual framework. It was a signal that invoices for collapse had begun arriving.
Only industries that can doubt a dazzling spring will welcome the next one. Now that the world loves Korean dramas, it is precisely the time to coldly examine whose pockets the love flows into and whose factories it empties. Prosperity is often the best disguise for collapse.