Amid discussions surrounding the hundreds of millions won in appearance fees for domestic actors, comparisons with Japan are gaining attention.
Recently, a post has spread across online communities regarding the appearance fees of a national actor who is actively working in Japan. The post includes details about the appearance fees of the lead actors in the NHK historical drama 'Kamakuradono no 13nin,' which aired in 2022.
It was reported that Japanese national actor Oguri Shun, who played the lead in the drama, received an appearance fee of about 500,000 yen (approximately 5 million won) per episode. Additionally, Yui Aragaki received around 300,000 yen (approximately 3 million won), and Masaki Suda received about 200,000 yen (approximately 2 million won) per episode.
This was in response to a report stating that actor Kim Soo-hyun's appearance fee for tvN's 'Queen of Tears' was 300 million won per episode. Moreover, as reports indicated that this amount was actually lower than in the previous work, netizens pointed out that 'our country's celebrities are paid too much.' In this context, the appearance fees of nearby Japanese actors have come to the fore.
In particular, the production cost of 'Queen of Tears,' which consists of 16 episodes, is about 40 billion won, and when Kim Soo-hyun's appearance fee is 300 million won per episode, this means that a total of 5 billion won, or one-eighth of the total production cost, goes to Kim Soo-hyun's fee. As a result, a suggestion has arisen that the high production costs of domestic dramas are also due to the actors' appearance fees.
In contrast, even for famous actors in Japan, their appearance fees are less than half of those of domestic actors. Considering that the appearance fees for actors in NHK historical dramas tend to be extremely low, it is known that even lead actors in large-scale productions in Japan receive per-episode fees in the tens of millions of yen. Ryoko Yonekura, who has successfully led the 'Doctor X' series while receiving extraordinary guarantees each season, received an appearance fee of 5 million yen (about 50 million won) per episode in 2021.
In response, netizens claimed, 'Korean actors should lower their appearance fees to those of Japanese actors.' Some argued that the drama market size and production environments in Japan and Korea are different, making them not comparable, but even so, the general sentiment was that the appearance fees of domestic actors are abnormally high.
In Japan, it is known that the total appearance fees for actors in network dramas do not exceed 30% of the production budget, and in China, the total appearance fees also cannot exceed 40% of the production budget, with leading actors' fees not surpassing 70% of the total appearance fees. Therefore, as the appearance fees of top stars soar into the hundreds of millions, there is a growing call for the adoption of a similar system domestically.
[Photo] OSEN DB, Tristone Entertainment
[OSEN]