The Walt Disney Company enters a new phase of major productions, with plans to expand ESPN’s sports offerings beyond Australia and New Zealand, while increasing investment in local content in Japan and South Korea.
Luke Kang, president of The Walt Disney Company Asia Pacific, said the streamer is maturing its regional strategy after four years of laying the groundwork in most markets. Disney+ is currently focused on high-quality productions from Japan and South Korea that can be released around the world, while monitoring new opportunities in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
“It’s been about four or five years since we’ve been in this region, and I think most of our markets are in their fourth year of launch,” Kang told Variety. “We always thought of the first few years as a period of setting the table and building the foundation,” he told Variety on the sidelines of the Disney+ original preview event at Hong Kong Disneyland Resort.
The company’s upcoming Asia-Pacific productions range from anime, Korean dramas, unscripted content, and cross-border romantic comedies, including an adaptation of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding Isolations (working title), the Japanese-Korean series Mary Berry Love, and the webtoon-based Empress Remarried.
“We work with the top creators in the region,” says Kang. “We know we’re not in a volume game. We want to make sure we create compelling stories and deliver compelling stories to our viewers.”
Since 2021, Disney+ has produced over 150 APAC originals. The company is currently focusing its resources on Japan and South Korea, and Kang believes it can produce large-scale, high-quality productions with global appeal.
“We learned that great stories, great storytelling, break boundaries,” he says. “We also learned that creativity exists in many different areas.”
Japan is an area of particular focus. While the country has long been known for its high-quality animation, Kang sees the country emerging as a source of compelling live-action drama.
“We feel we can produce quality products that can compete globally in these markets,” he says. “Currently, we are focusing on Japan and South Korea because we feel there is potential for large-scale production to come from there.”
The company also taps into Asia’s rich pipeline of source material, from webtoons and web novels to traditional literature and folklore. Kang points out that crowdsourcing platforms like Webtoon allow Disney to identify popular stories before they are animated.
“Everyone is more capable of telling great stories now,” he says. “Another great thing is that we know what was popular, so we can focus our resources on the most popular articles.”
Future plans include unscripted content such as “Battle of Fate,” a competition between fortune tellers and oracles, and “Travis Japan Summer Vacation!! in the USA,” a documentary that follows seven members on a 10-day American road trip.
While Disney+ is closely watching Asia’s micro-drama boom, particularly its explosive growth in mainland China, Kang said the company has no clear plans to enter this space.
“We’ve been looking at microdramas for a long time,” he says. “This is very early stages, but it’s very exciting. We think this should be part of how we tell stories in the future.”
On the sports side, Disney launched ESPN on Disney+ in Australia and New Zealand as a springboard for regional expansion. The company is currently exploring a phased strategy that combines regional sports rights with locally popular content.
“There is hardly a single sport that covers the entire region,” Kang explains. The company is coordinating the availability of sports rights with ESPN expansion, which will vary by market and will not be available at the same time.
While Disney evaluates long-term rights acquisitions, it is also experimenting with event-based sports, such as broadcasting friendly soccer matches in South Korea.
In Southeast Asia, Disney has pivoted from a mass-market approach with its previous Disney+ Hotstar brand (now rebranded to Disney+) to a strategy that focuses on higher average revenue per user and specific audience segment. Although this has led to a decline in local content production in these markets, Kang said the company remains connected to the region’s creative community.
“We’re looking at Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia,” he says. “As our business grows and expands, we will continue to evaluate what we want to do from these markets.”
Citing the success of films like “Dangal,” which was a huge hit in its native India and also made $198 million in China, Kang emphasized that Disney’s approach is focused on creating content with a strong domestic market base that can be distributed overseas.
“I strongly believe that content needs a home,” he says. “Great content travels, and great stories travel across borders. But every piece of content always needs a home.”
