Adapting WEBTOON Titles for the Screen
WEBTOON titles have steadily been optioned by television and film studios around the world, including Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment, Netflix, and Skybound Entertainment; 50% of Netflix Korea’s original projects produced in 2023 were based on various WEBTOON properties. These aren’t confined to a single genre, either. From the feudal zombie-horror series Kingdom to the hard-hitting crime show Bloodhounds or even the coming-of-age romantic drama Love Alarm, some of Netflix’s biggest shows in the past few years have been based on WEBTOON stories. Whether you’re into zombies or period-piece romance stories, WEBTOON’s extensive library of titles includes all kinds of genres. Still, Kim and WEBTOON are very careful about entrusting adaptations to the right multimedia partners.
“It’s not just simply a business for us. This is a content business. Because of that, if you’re just looking at how to make money, that doesn’t work. You need to be really good at adapting that IP,” Kim observes. This distinction carries far beyond licensing titles to Netflix andCrunchyroll—it also extends to creative partnerships with American comic book companies like Marvel Entertainment and video game studios such as Ubisoft. WEBTOON publishes the official Assassin’s Creed tie-in comic, Assassin’s Creed: Forgotten Temple. Even the mega-popular K-pop band BTS has partnered with WEBTOON, releasing original comics on the platform that blend urban pop fantasy with classic Korean mythology.
Not Just Global Players
With this attention to quality and reader data in mind, Kim notes that the WEBTOON platform sends a message to storytellers and readers about its long reach and accessibility. The extensive audience and scope have consistently proved to creators that WEBTOON is unmatchable in its readership scale. This symbiotic dynamic has propelled the platform to its strong market position.
“It’s not simply that we want to show ourselves as global players,” Kim explains. “I think the message is clear to our readers: Through us, you can reach global audiences and, through real-time transactions, we can distribute it globally. This really showed the creators that it’s possible and really reinforced our No. 1 market position.”
This axiom has since proved especially true for uru-chan, a young comic book creator on the other side of the world from Kim, who started out telling her own stories through webcomics online. What she discovered in publishing her work on WEBTOON, with its steadily expanding international reach, would change her life and career.
The Endless Creative Possibilities of WEBTOON
One of the factors of WEBTOON’s success is its overall presentation: not only is it optimized for reading through desktop and laptop computers, but it’s also presented in a vertical scroll that makes it easy to follow along and read on mobile devices. After years of reading traditional comics and manga, along with publishing on other webcomics platforms prior to WEBTOON, uru-chan was quickly surprised by how WEBTOON’s presentation could expand her digital canvas. This expansion led to a greater sense of creative freedom, as uru-chan could let her imagination and visuals grow significantly on this platform.