I’m going to go out on a limb and say Netflix and other platforms probably picked up these shows/movies because they were cheap and wouldn’t need to pay out residuals if they became hits.

Kinda sucks they don’t get paid but honestly no one makes it out big on their first run. You use your new leverage to negotiate better the second time around, after you’re proven your worth.

A few exceptions to this, but more than likely the streaming platforms would have never picked up these shows were it not for the very beneficial terms.

Not even the creator of Squid Game is getting residuals, that’s crazy.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In April, the Directors Guild of Korea members took to the streets of central Seoul where the country’s Culture Ministry was holding a press conference on local copyright law.

Twenty-five years later, the directors are preparing to gather again to protest what they call the “collapse of the creative foundation” of the Korean film industry.

They are calling for revisions to the existing Copyrights Act, which dictates that all intellectual property and profits from video content belong solely to service providers — including legacy studios and streaming platforms — and do not have to be shared with individual professionals who participated in the creation.

Given such guidelines, companies like Netflix have faced little organized pressure to pay any residuals at all to Korean directors and screenwriters, even with massive hits like Squid Game.

“Without revising the Copyrights Act, we don’t have any bargaining power to negotiate remuneration issues with the production companies,” Yun-jeong Lee, a spokeswoman for the Directors Guild of Korea tells THR.

Hwang, the director of Squid Game, has also admitted in past interviews that he had the creative freedom to focus on his work because Netflix took the risk of investing in a production that other networks had passed on.

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