Netflix is turning a Venice trophy into a broader catalog moment. After Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, the streamer confirmed plans to expand availability of the director’s previous work worldwide, with country-specific rollout windows and subtitling up to six languages including Korean.
Which titles are moving
Green Fish and Secret Sunshine have been live since August in Italy, the UK, France, Australia and New Zealand. Peppermint Candy and Oasis joined in Italy and Spain on September 4. Poetry and Burning are slated for markets including Japan, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Netflix is not making every title available everywhere at once. Availability and timing vary by market, which matters for planners buying against local windows.
A festival-to-streaming calendar
Possible Love, Lee’s first feature in eight years, is positioned as both a theatrical and streaming event. The theatrical schedule begins in South Korea on September 23, moves to Australia and New Zealand on October 22, then reaches the UK, Japan, the US and Canada on October 23. The global Netflix premiere is set for November 6.
- September 23: South Korea theatrical
- October 22: Australia and New Zealand
- October 23: UK, Japan, US, Canada
- November 6: Netflix global premiere
Why this is a blueprint
The pattern is worth tracking: a festival prize creates press, a theatrical release sustains awards eligibility and cultural relevance, and a streaming premiere converts that attention into catalog consumption. Lee’s backlist gives Netflix a low-risk entry point for viewers who discover him through Possible Love, especially in markets where the older films had not previously been available.
Lee’s track record reinforces the play. He won Best Director at Venice in 2002 for Oasis, Best Screenplay at Cannes in 2010 for Poetry, and became the first Korean director to receive the Ebert Director Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Possible Love is also Korea’s official Academy Awards submission for Best International Feature, which keeps the title in the awards conversation into early next year.
The cast includes Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong. The story follows two couples—a laid-off worker and his spouse, and a documentary filmmaker and her spouse—whose paths cross during a documentary project.
What media teams should watch
For entertainment marketers, the actionable signal is sequencing. If you are planning around Korean drama or auteur cinema, aligning promotional spend with a festival-to-theatrical-to-streaming arc can extend a title’s useful life. The six-language subtitle plan removes a discovery barrier in non-Korean-speaking markets, but success will depend on how Netflix surfaces the backlist in-app and in algorithmic recommendations.
There are no subscriber or viewership figures in the announcement, so this is a strategy signal rather than a performance data point. The next measurable checks are Possible Love‘s Korean box office in late September and whether the November 6 streaming premiere drives the older titles into any public rankings.
Source: Deadline
