It was while sitting through the night in a 24-hour McDonald’s restaurant, devouring a screenplay by Anocha Suwichakornpong, that Chayamporn ‘Bench’ Taeratanachai decided to take the plunge and invest in the Asian arthouse films he loved. Using money from his family’s electrical equipment import business, he set up investment firm Cinema 22 in 2016 and soon had the gratification of seeing Anocha’s By The Time It Gets Dark win best picture at Thailand’s National Film Awards.
Since then, Cinema 22 has continued to deploy small amounts of private capital into a selection of Southeast Asian titles. Most recently, these include Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s 2025 Tokyo festival title Morte Cucina and last year’s Cannes Critics’ Week grand prize winner A Useful Ghost. “There were already many people making commercial films in Thailand, but so few making arthouse and I wanted more choices for Thai audiences. I’ve used the profit from my [family] business to make meaningful, high-quality cinema,” says Chayamporn.
Other credits include Bhutanese film The Monk And The Gun and Taste, by Vietnamese debut filmmaker Le Bao. “I told Soros [Sukhum, producer of A Useful Ghost] this might have to be my last arthouse investment. Fortunately, we more than recouped, we made a profit and everyone on the project, including director and producers, got paid.”
Breaking free
On a significantly larger scale, Muneyuki Kii, a veteran exhibitor turned producer with more than a decade inside major Japanese studio Toei, used the 2024 Cannes Film Festival as a launchpad for his new K2 Pictures and its accompanying K2P Film Fund, which he pitches as “a new ecosystem for Japanese filmmaking”. His motivation was to break free of the production committee structure, a corporate and risk-averse system used by Japanese studio films and indies alike for decades. With the fund’s first title, Yuriyan Retriever’s Mag Mag, released last October, and a slate of other titles, including Nanako Hirose’s Between Two Lovers, now in the pipeline, Kii appears to have succeeded in breaking free.
“The production committee system is a contractual system of cost-sharing, it’s not really investment. Moreover, foreign entertainment companies cannot be part of a committee-produced film,” notes Kii. “But with a slate financed by our own fund, we can bring in outside funding from a distributor, a sales agent or a foreign investor while still retaining all the IP within K2 Pictures.”
Kii says the fund has raised $30m and is now closed. The company’s website shows K2P Film Fund has attracted investment from a dozen institutional investors, including MUFG Bank, Mori Trust and a family office, with several of them each putting up $3.1m (jpy500m).
Not all of Asia’s film financing practices are so systematic or bear comparison with North America or Europe, with their richer mix of state or EU subsidy, equity investment, debt financing and predictable pre-sales. Throughout much of East Asia, corporations typically use their balance sheets to bankroll their own productions. That carries clear risk, with ancillary markets considerably shallower than those of the US. But the strength to self-finance may come from vertical integration across media disciplines such as exhibition, talent management and VFX or production services. And film production firms may be part of larger conglomerates. In many cases, both descriptions apply.
Hong Kong’s Emperor Entertainment is part of a jewellery and property giant. Thailand’s biggest film investor, M Cinema, is part of a group that develops shopping malls and controls 80% of the country’s cinemas. Even Japan’s Toho, which has diverse film interests stretching from shooting stages to cinemas, also has property and highways offshoots. South Korean entertainment giant CJ ENM is part of a catering, food commodities and logistics ‘chaebol’ that has family connections to electronics behemoth Samsung.
While Asia’s reliance on self-financing and alliances with friendly partner companies may mean that budgets and production volume oscillate along with these firms’ performances, it has also allowed Asia’s producers to eschew costly completion bonds and the kind of bank finance that is more common overseas.
Western financiers have made regular pitches in Asia, but most come away disappointed or recast their ambitions. East-West Bank has done little project financing in China since the 2012-18 co-production boom but has stayed the course and is now an experienced corporate lender to media conglomerates. (With former Ampas president Janet Yang and CJ ENM founder Miky Lee, the bank’s CEO Dominic Ng is a co-founder of aspiring pan-Asian production house First Light StoryHouse, which launched a year ago.)
South Korea had previously been the Asian country with by far the most organised film funding structures. Made in 2019, Oscar winner Parasite was able to count on institutional investors including Korea Post, KDB Capital, IBK Capital and Hana Financial Investment as well as hedge funds. But many funds, including those operated by Shinhan Bank and Daesung Private Equity, have left the film sector since Covid, scared off by plummeting box office, wounded by major flops such as 2022 fantasy sci-fi Alienoid or lured away by shinier alternatives in AI.
That narrative may at last be turning around. The Korean Film Council (Kofic) now identifies more than a dozen private sector film investment funds, ranking five as principal investors in medium-to-large-budget titles and another six as co-investors in small-to-medium-sized titles.
The main competition in Cannes saw another new name on the credits of Na Hong-jin’s Hope, said to be Korea’s most expensive ever feature. Private equity firm ATU Partners has made its film funding debut through a special purpose vehicle, ATU Culture Tech No. 6 Private Equity Investment. While industry gossip places the film’s budget as high as $67m (krw100bn), ATU has gone on the record saying it has put in $10m (krw15bn).
One area where Asia is becoming more like Europe is the availability of soft money. Many Asian governments have come to appreciate the virtues of the creative economy, soft power projection and film tourism. Korea’s ongoing film industry crisis has been recognised at presidential level and recently eased with an emergency $61m cash injection. Japan now describes content as a core industry alongside the more traditional car and electronics sectors.
State funding is available on a discretionary basis for film development and production in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Korea and Japan. Both Taiwan (through semi-governmental agency Taicca) and Singapore position themselves as regional film funding hubs. Singapore’s IMDA is these days less aggressive in the location attraction business, but its ‘Made With Singapore’ campaign is a success that has enabled large numbers of pan-Asian co-productions. These include Malaysia’s Tiger Stripes and Vietnam’s Don’t Cry Butterfly, a recipient of the Southeast Asia Co-Production Grant, as well as its native son Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes, beneficiary of its Media Talent Progression Programme.
Alongside these schemes, countries including Malaysia, Thailand and latterly Japan have instigated rebate schemes that put them on the radar of production managers for runaway or footloose international titles — and, by cutting the cost of doing business, keep their soundstages busy. Thailand — currently hosting Oliver Stone’s White Lies — is in the process of launching a parallel scheme for its local filmmakers.
The existence of these soft money schemes — as well as grants from foundations such as Thailand’s Purin Pictures, and the many post-production companies that provide cash and in-kind prizes to the region’s burgeoning project market scene — is increasingly helping Asia’s producers assemble their budgets as a blend of public and private finance, and many as co-productions.
Mother Bhumi, a 2025 Malaysian drama starring China’s Fan Bingbing, is increasingly typical. With co-producers from Italy, Hong Kong and Malaysia, it had public finance from Taiwan’s Taicca, Malaysia’s Finas and a grant from Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Fund. Private capital came from Malaysian investment firm SunStrong Entertainment and AMTD Pictures, a Hong Kong film finance unit of a Singapore and New York-based investment firm. Both companies declined to speak to Screen International, although AMTD’s website lists Zhang Yimou’s Scare Out, Peter Chan’s She’s Got No Name and Anselm Chan’s local hit The Last Dance among the recent Hong Kong and mainland Chinese titles it has backed.
Fast-turnaround projects
More options may be on the way. A new Southeast Asia-focused fund, Singapore-based Triple Green CineCapital, launched at Indonesia’s JAFF Market at the end of last year. Operated by experienced producer Leonard Lai and Hang Trinh, who is also a principal at Vietnam’s Skyline Media, it is looking to deploy $3m across an array of fast-turnaround projects.
“Our strategy is to do gap financing. We’ll not be funding 50%-60% of a $3m Thai film. But we will fund 10%-20% of films from Indonesia or Vietnam, where the average budget is below $1m and a big film is still below $2m,” says Lai. “We will consider investments at any stage from development until release, and are looking at commercial films where we can have a turnaround as fast as seven or eight months. We see 18 months to two years for a return as a maximum.”
With the increasing availability of soft money in the region, there is growing interest in use of debt to partner it across Asia. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry last month commissioned MUFG Bank and Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance to draft a common standard for financial institutions to evaluate a film production’s value. The ministry hopes that creating a level playing field will enable Japan’s banks to start project-by-project film lending, increase film budgets and help its movie industry catch up with Korea and the US.
MUFG says it intends to start film lending by 2027. It seems assured of one client already. K2 Pictures’ Kii says he plans to make the $30m capital he has in hand from the fund go further by matching it with $70m of debt finance.
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