Downside Of AI Overviews; Is Korea Recovering?; Indonesia 2026 H1 Box Office

In the week that Spider-Man: Brand New Day is tearing up the box office in multiple international territories, Streamlined is taking a look at whether the Korean market is recovering and what’s going on in Indonesia, where Spider-Man is already the highest-grossing film of the year. We’re also continuing our AI series with a brief look at AI Overviews, which apart from sounding like that mansplaining uncle at a party who thinks he knows everything and gets most of it wrong, will also have a knock-on effect for anyone trying to get publicity for their film or series.
 
The Streamlined Guide to Japanese Indie Producers will now be published in three parts, starting in the last week of August. We’ve been researching this report all summer, and it’s been fascinating, but there’s still a lot of information we need to fact check, and we beg your indulgence to wait a few more weeks. Streamlined Guides will also be taking a brief detour into updating the global landscape for streaming levies before looking at the independent production landscape in Korea later in the year. The Streamlined Guides are paywalled, with proceeds being ploughed back into journalists and research for future reports, so please consider signing up if you haven’t already.

How AI Overviews Are Decimating The Publishing Industry

Google’s AI Overviews are not a new thing, but it feels like the impact they’re having on the publishing industry accelerated this summer, coupled with a Google core update at the end of May that de-indexed millions of web pages and the increasing consumer use of other AI chatbots, including Claude, ChatGPT and their ilk.

Increasingly, web users are reading and relying on the AI summaries presented by Google, its Gemini chatbot, and all the other chatbots they’re searching on, rather than clicking through to the information’s original source. The impact on web traffic for most websites has been catastrophic. News outlets like Business Insider, NBC News and Axios are all seeing huge hits to traffic, while the UK’s Association Of Online Publishers estimates that traffic to UK publishers could halve by this time next year, which is a disaster if you’re selling advertising based on click-through rates.

Penske Media Corp, the owner of Deadline, Variety, Hollywood Reporter and Indiewire, is suing Google after affiliate revenue fell by more than a third in 2024 due to AI Overviews co-opting traffic that might have otherwise gone to PMC sites. Seriously, good for them; we need more publishing companies to stand up to the tech monopolists that benefit from other people's content without creating it themselves.

We’re basically witnessing one of the most shameless, monopolistic bait-and-switch moments of modern publishing history. Ever since Google launched in the late ‘90s, the deal was simple – allow Google crawlers to scrape your pages and in return you show up in search rankings and get referral traffic. Now Google is also scraping your pages to feed into its AI training models. But in return you get your content regurgitated in AI overviews so there’s less incentive for people to click through to your site. Adding insult to injury, around 10% of AI overviews are inaccurate.

Google is clearly only interested in keeping people locked within its own digital garden – and in controlling a more than 90% share of the ad tech market, according to a US Department of Justice filing in a mostly toothless antitrust case that the tech giant is now appealing. And now OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok and a host of other AI companies are also stealing and regurgitating journalism produced by publishing companies. In a move considered unimaginable just a few years ago, executives at some of the world’s biggest publishers are discussing whether to withdraw from Google Search and block their content from AI crawlers altogether.

Of course, some of the larger publishing groups, like the New York Times, are doing licensing deals with AI companies, to mitigate some of the losses, but this is not an option open to small, independent publishers. Big publishers by necessity focus on stories that drive big traffic – in the film world that means Hollywood, Bollywood, K-pop and anime – so it will become harder than ever to cover “niche” or specialist topics like first-time directors, documentaries, shorts and non English-language films.

So when you’re pitching a story or interview about a film or any other piece of visual content over this autumn festival season, keep in mind that you’re likely dealing with a publication that has recently experienced a massive drop in ad revenue and cutting back on its budget for reporters. Of course, there’s also subscription-based publishing but in my experience the film industry has a huge aversion to paywalled content. Publicists want big traffic numbers and consumers have subscription fatigue. But we need to make money to continue paying critics and journalists, unless of course we submit to having all our content written by AI.

Streamlined has a subscription business model, so is not dependent on web traffic to sell advertising, and so far visitor numbers are holding steady, but thanks to the recent Google core update is more difficult to find through search. Streamlined also needs to figure out how it interacts with Google and AI chatbots – basically what we keep paywalled and what we offer up to our AI overlords to steal and regurgitate. As we work through these decisions, we’ll be sending out a survey in September to ask our readers what they value and how they use our content. Your input will be greatly appreciated.

Korea Has Reason For Hope But Still Faces Challenges

The Korean Film Council’s 2026 first half box office figures were encouraging, although headlines in some trade papers were misleading, as local films registered their biggest first half box office since the pandemic, but the market as a whole did not. Korean films, headed by The King’s Warden (see chart below), registered an 82% year-on-year increase in revenue to $262m (KRW370bn), which was the highest level since 2019.

However, while the market as a whole grew 42% year-on-year to $409m (KRW579bn), this was still below the $430m (KRW608bn) clocked up in the first half of 2023 and $431m (KRW610bn) in the first half of 2024. KOFIC estimates that the market reached only 69% of pre-pandemic levels in the first half of this year.

Foreign film revenue came in at $148m (KRW209bn), which was a 2.3% increase on the first half of 2025, but also way behind the first halves of 2023 and 2024. Project Hail Mary and Avatar: Fire And Ash were the top-grossing foreign films of this period, ranking fourth and fifth respectively. Notably, admissions for foreign films actually decreased year-on-year by 6.9% to 19.68 million, reflecting a greater dependence on more expensive, special format screenings.

And of course all the rankings have changed since the first half ended. Na Hong-jin’s Hope, released on July 15, is now the fourth biggest film of the year so far on $33m. Sony’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day swung into town on July 29 and has already overtaken Yeon Sang-ho’s Colony to become the second-highest grossing film of 2026 with $46m.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened on August 5 and is ranking ninth with $18m. There was a lot riding on Hope, as its producer Plus M Entertainment is one of a group of companies under JoongAng Group currently filing for bankruptcy protection, but while it started off strongly, it was soon pushed aside by Spider-Man and The Odyssey.

Still, the Korean industry, which had a 64% market share and recovered to 94% of pre-pandemic levels in the first half of 2026, can take some comfort from these figures, although the spoils are not exactly evenly spread. Showbox had the top three films and an almost 49% market share from January-June 2026 – followed by Disney (14%), Universal (6.5%) and Sony (6.1%) – while the next biggest Korean studio was N.E.W. with a 4.3% market share, mostly driven by spy action film Humint.

And some fun facts for indie distributors – Japanese films had a combined 3.4% market share, mostly driven by anime, while European films had a 1.2% share, with Sentimental Value the top European film with $550,000 (KRW778m).

Of course, it’s great to see Hollywood titles performing strongly – theatres need all kinds of content in order to survive – but Spider-Man and The Odyssey may prove to be outliers and the line-up of Korean films scheduled for the second half so far has tons of quality but not many obvious blockbuster releases. Titles scheduled around the Chuseok holiday (September 24-26) include Warner Bros' Korean remake of The Intern, starring Choi Min-sik and Han so-hee, along with Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love and Hur Jin-ho’s The Assassins(s) fresh from their premieres in Venice and Toronto.