From ‘Parasite’ to ‘Bugonia’: How Korea’s CJ ENM Became a Regular Oscars Contender

When Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2019, Miki Lee, vice-chairwoman of CJ Group, the powerhouse Korean conglomerate behind the film, called an emergency meeting among her executives.

“She gathered the whole senior management team and said, ‘It’s time for us to go after the Oscars,’” remembers Jerry Ko, CJ ENM’s head of global film. “We had been preparing to go global in many ways, but we had never campaigned for an Oscar before — no Korean film had ever even been nominated. It felt like a tough mission for us.”

The Oscars glory came swifter — and bigger — than anyone at the studio expected, Ko says. Parasite, of course, would go on to dominate the 2020 Academy Awards, winning best picture, best director, best screenplay and best international feature. The film’s triumph soon came to be seen as a watershed moment for Korean pop culture’s global rise, arriving just a year before Squid Game became Netflix’s most-watched series of all time.

But CJ ENM’s awards ambitions and global expansion strategy were always about more than just a one-off Oscars phenomenon. Parasite made for a triumphant start, but less noticed by the industry, the studio was soon back at the Oscars as a co-producer of Celine Song’s acclaimed romantic drama Past Lives (2023), which was partly told in Korean. This year, CJ ENM is again in contention with Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s Bugonia, nominated for best picture, best actress, best adapted screenplay and best score. A remake of the cult Korean film Save the Green Planet! from 2003, Bugonia was developed and produced by CJ ENM and distributed globally by Focus Features — an effort the Korean company viewed as its own answer to A24’s success streak with offbeat, seductively packaged art cinema.

In recent years, CJ ENM has also weathered several coulda/shoulda nomination near misses from some of Asia’s top auteurs, such as Japanese Oscar nominee Hirokazu Kore-eda with his Korean-language drama Broker (2022), and the great Park Chan-wook’s critically acclaimed latest features, Decision to Leave (2022) and No Other Choice (2025).

But already, the recent track record makes CJ ENM the most decorated studio in Asia at the Academy Awards — and one of the most consistent contenders among non-U.S. studios, including European companies.

“Each of these projects had a distinct strategy and positioning for winning in the international market,” explains Ko. “Past Lives was an A24 film that we could join as a co-producer and add a lot of value because of the film’s Korean cultural elements and setting. Bugonia was about using the great Korean storytelling in our library and reimagining it for global audiences with global talent. For Broker, although it didn’t make it to the Oscars, we worked with a great Japanese director to make a Korean film with a universal story that could travel.”

While Park’s Decision to Leave and No Other Choice were only shortlisted — narrowly missing out on nominations in the best international feature category, keeping the esteemed director’s unfortunate snub streak alive — Ko says the latter film was a significant commercial success for CJ, having achieved one of the “strongest overseas pre-sales numbers ever for a Korean film” ahead of its launch in Venice. It later performed solidly for Neon in North America, bringing in more than $10 million over the holiday season.

As astute a media industry observer as any of his Hollywood counterparts, Ko recognizes that the timing of CJ ENM’s global push was fortuitous, arriving just as social media and streaming were exposing and exciting a new generation of content consumers with culturally diverse pop culture. The shift, he says, began in the late 2010s, as younger audiences increasingly discovered films and series through globalized digital ecosystems rather than traditional, country-by-country media pipelines.

“The flow of information about content has completely changed,” Ko explains. “Before, audiences discovered films through traditional media in their own country. Now everything spreads through social media, and younger audiences are gathering recommendations and discovering content from all over the world, instantly.”

At the same time, streaming platforms further altered the reach and reception of traditional film and TV content. In the pre-streaming era, even acclaimed foreign films faced major logistical and commercial barriers to distribution abroad. Netflix swiftly helped global viewers overcome the “one-inch barrier of subtitles” that Bong famously mentioned in his best-director Oscars speech, teasing American viewers to embrace more world cinema.

Together, those shifts — borderless digital discovery and frictionless global distribution — created the conditions for Korean storytelling to break out worldwide. Younger audiences, already accustomed to subtitles and dubbing through the global rise of K-pop, anime and other international media, proved especially receptive. Parasite, Ko says, arrived at exactly the right cultural moment. “It touched that threshold,” he says.

The Academy’s recent efforts to diversify by inviting more international members into the fold have also unmistakably boosted the worldliness of the tastes on display at the Oscars ceremony.

For CJ ENM, such changes have effectively leveled the playing field with Hollywood’s traditional dominance. “Those trends made it easier for foreign players like us to create global films,” Ko adds.

The Korean studio’s upcoming slate suggests its awards ambitions and international goals are only intensifying. In the Bugonia vein, Ko’s team is working with Michael Mann on a reimagining of its classic Korean crime blockbuster Veteran (2015), as well as developing star-driven English-language reimaginings of Park Chan-wook’s Lady Vengeance (2005) and Thirst (2009), and director Kwon Oh-seung’s 2021 psychological thriller Midnight. The company is also preparing to begin production on its long-gestating baseball project Super Fan, which tells the story of a Korean follower of the Kansas City Royals who became a minor celebrity over his passionate fandom. Somewhat like Past Lives, the project has a mixed Hollywood and Korean cast in place and will begin shooting early next year.

CJ ENM could soon be campaigning again alongside the figure who kickstarted the studio’s Oscars trajectory, too. The company is again backing Bong Joon Ho’s next Korean feature, The Valley. The director’s first animated film, The Valley explores the relationship between humans and deep-sea creatures and will feature a score composed by John Carpenter.

Adds Ko: “Director Bong’s new film will wrap in the second half of this year and we expect to introduce it at one of the major festivals in 2027 — hopefully starting another exciting journey together.”