Hollywood is showing a growing interest in Korean storytelling that goes beyond K-dramas and K-pop, and the latest adaptation project highlights that expanding focus.

In the past, Hollywood often centered on acquiring finished series for streaming platforms or remaking proven box-office hits. Korean cinema has been mined this way before: the 2006 romance "The Lake House," starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, was a remake of the 2000 Korean film "Il Mare," and Spike Lee’s 2013 "Oldboy" reworked Park Chan-wook’s 2003 thriller of the same name. Now, major studios and publishers are reaching further upstream. Rather than relying only on mainstream successes, they are seeking rights to original literary works and older cult properties in order to rebuild stories from the ground up.

"The DallerGut Dream Department Store," a fantasy novel by Korean author Lee Mi-ye, is being developed into a live-action film by Disney, U.S. entertainment news outlet Deadline reported Aug. 12. Screenwriter Patrick Ness, known for adapting young adult works including the "Chaos Walking" trilogy and "A Monster Calls," will write the screenplay for the adaptation. The project also builds on Disney’s existing investment in Korean content: its Disney+ streaming service has already released Korean-language originals such as the 2023 series "Moving," itself adapted from a Kang Full webtoon.

The story follows a protagonist named Penny, who sells dreams to sleeping customers at a department store and then faces a mystery when strange things begin happening to those customers.

Lee’s novel sold more than 1 million copies in Korea after its 2020 release, becoming the first Korean novel published in the 2020s to reach that milestone. It has since been translated into more than 20 languages and has global sales of more than 2 million copies.

The author, a former semiconductor engineer at Samsung Electronics, said the story came from her curiosity about why humans spend roughly one-third of their lives sleeping.

The Disney project comes amid a broader wave of Korean intellectual property moving into English-language productions, a shift that gained momentum after Bong Joon-ho’s "Parasite" became the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020.

Director Kim Jee-woon, known for the revenge thriller "I Saw the Devil" (2010) and the period action film "The Age of Shadow" (2016), is preparing "The Hole," an English-Korean bilingual film based on Pyun Hye-young’s Shirley Jackson Award-winning novel of the same name. The film stars British actor Theo James as a professor left paralyzed after a car accident that killed his wife, who is played by Jung Ho-yeon, the star of Netflix’s hit series "Squid Game," which became the platform’s most-watched series after its 2021 release.

Genre filmmaking has proven especially exportable.

"Save the Green Planet!," a 2003 Korean film directed by Jang Joon-hwan that failed at the domestic box office before becoming a beloved cult classic, resurfaced last year as "Bugonia." Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone — reuniting the pair after "Poor Things," which earned Stone the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2024 — the remake opened in theaters in the United States in October and in Korea in November.

Ma Dong-seok’s crime franchises are following a similar international path. His 2019 film "The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil" is currently being remade in the United States, while his hit "The Roundup" series is separately being adapted in Japan, giving the same actor’s intellectual property parallel lives in two different markets.

The trend also extends to studio-level agreements. Last October, Warner Bros. Discovery signed a deal with CJ ENM — one of Korea’s largest entertainment groups, whose film arm CJ Entertainment distributed "Parasite" in Korean theaters — to lead English-language remakes from the Korean studio’s film library. In return, CJ ENM will develop Korean adaptations of Warner Bros. titles, creating a two-way pipeline rather than negotiating rights on a title-by-title basis.