TYPHOON COMING TO NORTH AMERICA

This is how you do it. After a record-breaking opening in Korea, the big budget Korean blockbuster TYPHOON is getting a North American release, but no Hollywood studio has picked up its rights. Instead, CJ Entertainment has worked out a deal where Dreamworks/Paramount will be distributing TYPHOON in North America via their distribution network.

No dates yet for the release, but it looks like we're talking early 2006. It also appears that Dreamworks has picked up the remake rights to TYPHOON.

This is the second time an alternate means of distributing Korean films in the US has been tried. In early 2004, Tartan released an unsubtitled version of the hit Korean film SILMIDO in the US before it was even out on video in Korea and from what I've heard they made a nice pocketful of change on it.

Also interesting is the fact that CJ was one of the initial investors in Dreamworks back when it was founded in 1994 which reverses what we think of as the usual model where Hollywood money gets dumped into foreign film industries, here's Korean money being used to start a Hollywood studio.

This North American distribution deal for TYPHOON comes at the very end of a bonanza year for Korean film exports, which have been rising steadily for 9 straight years, and 2005 saw them increase 15% over 2004. A lot of this was due to Japan paying big bucks for Korean movies like APRIL SNOW ($7.5 million - it grossed $23.5 million in Japan), SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE ($3 million) and TYPHOON ($4 million).

DID YOU KNOW: that TYPHOON is about pirates? Argh!