I have no idea of who controls what. All I know is that Netflix has a large quantity of content, more that I watch there than at other streaming services. I know that Korea produces a lot of movies and series, but don't know who controls the content. Japan has long produced excellent movies, and Hollywood copied the storylines and westernized the copies ("Seven Samurai" becoming "The Magnificent Seven" etc.). Quality of film, acting, and content is superb in Korean and Japanese films. Chinese films are less so.
Netflix is a content firehose. Some of it is good. The problem is finding it. What is pumped at me on the landing page is usually dreary, repetitive, and too often burdened with Hollywood PC nonsense. If I know what I’m looking for, it’s easy enough to search for it, but I have to know it’s there first. That’s the branding and marketing problem. The good films are often hiding in plain sight, obscured by the clouds of lowest common denominator junk being pushed at mass audiences.
I never bothered to explore good search engines until I started reading reviews and trying to track down more obscure films. That led to Roku and the information box on Letterboxd that tells where films are showing. They don’t show everything, but they have certainly extended my field of vision significantly.
Even if a film isn’t available for free through a subscription, it’s usually a cheap rental. There have only been a couple of films in the last two or three years that I have not been able to find anywhere. It’s a whole new world once one has the ability to search across platforms.
Is there any particular service that you use for the Korean and Japanese films? And where do you find good recommendations? There are also good films coming out of Eastern Europe, which could educate Hollywood about communism if Hollywood would pay attention, but how much of it is picked up for the U.S. market, I don’t know. Even in a global streaming environment, someone has to decide a foreign film is worth dubbing or providing subtitles, and that it will have enough appeal to be leased for a foreign market.