Who Sets the Price for a Meeting?
Performance Fee Caps and the Shift of Power
This fall of 2025, Netflix capped top actors’ per-episode fees at the 300-million-won range. This is not cause for celebration—it’s an incident that raises the question of where pricing power has shifted.
In September 2025, a brief industry report quietly spread: Netflix began capping top actors’ per-episode fees in new contracts at up to 300 million won. This marks a dramatic retreat from the days when such fees reportedly reached 400 million, 500 million, and even 800 million won per episode. For Korea’s drama industry—long burdened by soaring production costs—this news sounded welcome. Yet if we greet this development solely as good news, we risk missing the crucial question altogether.
The question is not the amount of appearance fees, but rather who determines that amount. Just a few years ago, appearance fees were market-driven prices negotiated through tug-of-war among actors, their agencies, and production companies. Yet in the third quarter of 2025, a single global platform effectively unilaterally “announced” those fees. The authority to set prices has shifted hands. This shift is the real event confronting Korea’s drama industry this quarter.
At the root of this crisis lies an uncontrollable surge in production costs. Disney+’s “Polaris” reportedly cost approximately 70 billion KRW, while Netflix’s “Squid Game” and “Moving” each cost around 50 billion KRW and 65 billion KRW, respectively. The average per-episode production budget has already become a baseline of 2 billion KRW—starkly contrasting with Japanese dramas, which typically spend around 1 billion KRW per episode, and top-tier actors’ fees, which amount to just several million KRW per episode—a disparity that is clearly abnormal.
A large portion of these costs is concentrated among a few individuals. According to the Korean Drama Production Association, when you combine actors' fees and writers' manuscript fees, they account for about two‑thirds of the total production budget. The two leads of “Ppopssak Sogatssuda” were reportedly paid 500 million won each per episode, amounting to roughly 16 billion won for a 16‑episode series. While production costs have skyrocketed, the blame has been directed not at the entire work but at a handful of people at the top. The association’s statement expressing despair—“10 billion won per episode is the reality”—stemmed from this asymmetry.
The runaway production costs arrived from an unexpected source. The very “numbers” behind the dramas have collapsed. The number of episodes produced fell from about 135 in 2022 to 123 in 2023, and is projected to be around 100 in 2024. In just two years, more than a quarter of them have vanished.
While one or two high-budget tentpole productions have dominated the spotlight, an entire tier of mid-scale, stable works has vanished. Broadcasters, unable to cover production costs with advertising revenue, have successively scrapped traditional programming slots such as Wednesday–Thursday dramas. The stages where rookie actors build their careers, where writers learn through trial and error, and where crew members earn their livelihoods have all shrunk. Though the industry’s outward appearance has grown dazzling—thanks to 70-billion-won mega-productions—the ecosystem’s midsection, its foundational core, has been hollowed out.
Thus, Netflix’s cap on actor salaries is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it serves as external regulation stepping in where the market failed to self-correct. While the industry was citing China’s example—where actor salaries are capped at 40% of total production costs—the entity that actually wielded the knife was not the government or any association, but the commissioning party itself: Netflix.
The counterargument is clear: the cap on appearance fees is ultimately the most realistic and effective lever for rationally controlling production costs, and regardless of who wields it, the act of deflating the bubble itself is justified. There’s merit to this view. Yet the power to set prices is also the power to define an industry. The entity capable of imposing a cap on appearance fees can also determine the direction of planning, the tone of a work, and even who survives in the industry. The fact that the hand deflating the bubble is the same hand holding the leash—that is the true weight of this cap.
The warning that global capital—Netflix and others—can turn its attention to Japan and Southeast Asia, saying it “doesn’t have to be K‑content,” is not empty talk. In a system where the client sets the price, determines the lineup, and decides survival, Korean dramas risk slipping from being creators to merely a supplier whose price is fixed.
The Q3 2025 cap on appearance fees should therefore be read not as cost-cutting news, but as a signal of a shift in power. The real challenge is not “how much is appropriate?” but whether our industry can regain the capacity to set that appropriate threshold ourselves. Who determines the value of a single appearance? Unless we answer that question ourselves, the bubble will inevitably return the moment the cap is lifted.