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UTA and Gold House are joining forces at the Busan International Film Festival and in Seoul this month, marking the Asian Pacific advocacy organization’s first official foray into Korea as the two look to connect Asian creatives
and investors with Hollywood.
The partnership kicks off with the UTA x Gold House x Variety Industry Night at the Park Hyatt on Friday (Oct. 9). The two companies will then stage a panel, “Hollywood & the Asian Diaspora,” at the Asian Contents & Film Market on Oct. 10, before moving to Seoul on Oct. 13 for a speakeasy party for cross-cultural creatives, funders and founders.
David Park, a senior partner and agent at UTA, notes that the agency has worked in Asia, particularly Korea and Japan, for several years. “Adding Gold House has allowed us to level up, quite frankly,” he says.
Until now, Gold House’s formal footprint in Asia had been limited to Singapore and Taiwan. Christine Yi, executive VP and president, Gold House Studios., is of Korean heritage, as is Daniel Suh, who runs the organization’s venture capital fund. The pair made an exploratory trip to Korea around this time last year to meet people in the local industry and ask what role Gold House could play.
“What we had heard the most about was, do the Gold House thing here. You don’t really have to reinvent the wheel,” Yi says. “Especially as it relates to bringing major Hollywood executives, Dave included, to the table in order to really help facilitate more cross-border partnership, that’s something that they would really want from us.”
“I don’t know if 2026 is the right moment, honestly. The right moment would have been sometime in the past, so I would say that we’re actually overdue,” Yi adds, pointing to Gold House’s investments in Korean startups and the number of its investors based in the country.
Neither side has a formal, ongoing program in place yet. Gold House launched Gold House Studios, its in-house production arm, this year, and Yi plans to use the Korea trip to meet creatives the company wants to work with. “The partnership to us is really all about network and ecosystem building,” she says.
On what they look for in Asian talent and IP, both point to authenticity. “Specificity is what leads to success,” Yi says. “Audiences can tell when something has been watered down for a global palate, and that’s not what they’re asking for.”
Projects needn’t be in English, she adds, but they must connect with English-speaking audiences, where Gold House’s audience base sits. The company’s track record also leans heavily on first features, a stage where filmmakers “need someone to really take a bet on them.”
Yi is also eyeing Korean talent-led projects. She won’t name names, but says a singer from a group that would come up “within your first couple” if one listed the top K-pop acts in the world has approached Gold House about making a film.
“She can call anybody at all. But I think the way that her team wanted to approach us is like, ‘You guys might not be exactly the people, for whatever reason. However, we trust that you know who the right people are if it is not you, and to help us really navigate the U.S.,’” Yi says. “That’s a super-intimidating ask, especially when you’re coming in in a new medium that audiences might not necessarily associate with you.”
Gold House hopes to guide the strategy and possibly work on the production, and Yi sees overseas talent looking for “a safe place to land” as a pipeline worth exploring while in Korea.
Park’s touchstones for authenticity include “Parasite,” whose upstairs-downstairs class story landed in France, and “KPop Demon Hunters,” from his client Maggie Kang. “The only regret she has is that she didn’t add more Korean into the lyrics of some of the songs, or more actual specific locations that she wanted to bring into it,” he says, describing it as a balance Kang had to strike with Sony Pictures and Netflix.
He would also like to see Korea tackle horror comedy. “Comedy is so culturally subjective, it’s harder to travel. But when embedded so intricately and so deeply with horror, for example, that could work, and it could be a huge hit,” Park says.
One of the biggest gaps in the Asia-Hollywood pipeline, in Park’s view, is a shortage of crossover producers with a base in Asia and relationships with L.A. buyers. Outside Netflix and Disney, which run local teams, most buyers rely on U.S. headquarters to judge premium local-language content. “I probably can, if I had to, list those people on one hand,” he says.
For Yi, one gap is capital. She is keen to see whether Asia-based private investors would back U.S. independent films, an asset class she says many individuals in U.S. indie film treat “like philanthropy.” She is also scouting Korean unscripted producing partners.
Looking further ahead, Yi wants to build a cross-border talent development program, whether an exchange, a shadowing scheme or an accelerator.
Park is on board, noting that Bong Joon Ho and “Squid Game” creator Hwang Dong-hyuk can now stay in Seoul and still win Oscars and Emmys. He points to his client Na Hong-Jin, whose “Hope” he calls the biggest movie out of Korea. “Identifying him before he did ‘The Wailing’ would be incredible,” Park says.
Gold House has an executive producer role on Stephanie Ahn’s “Bedford Park,” which is screening at the festival.
