Netflix’s 2025 film slate involves collaborations with its most diverse range of Korean directors ever, the platform’s director of content for Korea, Vincent Taewon Kim, said during the APAC Film Showcase in Tokyo this week.

The seven original Korean films for this year follow last year’s “Mission Cross”, “Uprising” and “Officer Black Belt”, which “expanded in both genre and variety of storytelling”, Kim said, putting genre diversification and enhancing quality and entertainment value at the top of his priority list.

Directors working with Netflix for the first time in 2025 include up-and-coming filmmaker Han Ji-won of coming-of-age romance “Lost in Starlight” – Netflix’s first original Korean animation film – and Namkoong Sun of “Love Untangled”.

Han and Sun join a group of directors that includes Yeon Sang-ho (“Hellbound” and “Parasyte: The Grey”) and Byun Sung-hyun (“Kill Boksoon”).

The 2025 slate spans action, thriller, rom-com, sci-fi, drama and animation. “Some are very huge theatrical-scale films, as well as stories and genres rarely seen elsewhere,” Kim said. 

Q3 2025 titles are thriller “Wall to Wall” from director Kim Tae-joon; young romance “Love Untangled” about a 19-year-old girl with very frizzy hair from director Namkoong Sun; and “Kill Boksoon” spinoff, “Mantis”. 

These are followed by “Good News”, about a group of people who use all their wits to land a hijacked plane, and sci-fi disaster feature, “Great Flood”.

Director Han Ji-won said during the showcase that “Lost in Starlight”, which took five or six years to make, was the realisation of a creative dream of marrying music and outer space. “I also wanted to deal with the theme of love and marriage and romance because that was something that I started to think about in real life as well,” she said.

Talking about “Wall to Wall”, Kim Tae-joon said 84 sqm was the most common size of a Korean apartment. “In recent years, noise complaints among neighbors have become something that's very often dealt with and talked about in Korea. It's a huge social issue… I thought that this was going to be a topic that I can  tell a very intriguing story about,” he said. 

Apartments in Korean society are “not just a place where you live, but it can be intertwined with themes of loans, mortgages, you know, crypto investments and all kinds of other themes. So, you know, I think Korean society has a lot of issues, a lot of conflicts, especially for younger adults,” he added.

Namkoong Sun said “Love Untangled” offered “something that was a little bit on a brighter note” than his films exploring the difficulties and hardships of contemporary life. 

“I came across the script and the backdrop for this film is Busan in 1998 and it was about the pure love and friendship of young people. I thought when I first read the script that this is exactly what we need today.”