Miky Lee built South Korea's first movie multiplex, invested in DreamWorks and has since grown a $4.1 billion entertainment empire that helped launch a generation of filmmakers including Bong Joon Ho. Now she's coming for Hollywood
. "Our generation, even down to Bong Joon Ho's generation, call ourselves Hollywood kids, because we were constantly fed with this content," she says. "I felt like America really had the freedom of a wide range of creativity."
"We didn't have multiplexes," she says of Korea in the mid-'90s. "We had these little video stores, not even chains." Lee and her brother were determined to invest in cinema construction not just to impress their new Hollywood partners, but primarily to grow the local film market. "Back then, Hollywood content was a superpower.
"From early on, she and her brother had a vision, which was probably kind of audacious," says Imax CEO Rich Gelfond, who first struck a five-theater deal with CGV in 2005; the partnership has yielded 174 theaters across Korea, China, Vietnam and Turkey. "Miky and CJ were groundbreaking in the way they modernized and reinvented the moviegoing experience," he adds.
Lee had similar ambitions to turn K-pop music into a globally popular genre. Although K-pop artists now regularly tour around the world, many international fans got their first live experience with them through KCON, Lee's brainchild that she conceived a decade ago while attending a UFC convention and realizing, "Wow, we can do this with K-pop." More than a million people have now attended the music and cultural festival across six countries including Mexico, France and Abu Dhabi.
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