Why David Shin’s Disney+ Crime Thriller ‘House of the Owl’ Is a Test Run for Hollywood-Style Recurring Series Made in Japan
While multiple Korean TV series have connected with global audiences, Japan’s production committees, terrestrial broadcasters and talent agencies have kept their TV industry tightly focused on a local market.
Anime and variety have long remained the Japanese TV industry’s best-known exports, while the premium end of the spectrum has largely escaped Japanese producers. That is despite multinational shows like Hulu’s “Shogun,” HBO’s “Tokyo Vice” and Netflix’s “House of Ninjas” underscoring the potentially substantial overseas interest in Japan-set live-action drama.
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“House of the Owl,” set to begin airing on Disney+ and Hulu from next week, is both an outlier and a potential mold breaker.
A crime thriller about a behind-the-scenes political fixer and his chafing rivalry with his son, “House of the Owl” was conceived as a five-season ride along the lines of “House of Cards” or “Succession.” But overcoming the obstacles on the way to bringing “House of the Owl” to the screen has been a 10-year journey for the series and its showrunner, former executive David Shin.
Korean-born but U.S.-educated, Shin worked for 10 years in Japan as the president of Fox Networks Group. From 2019 to 2023, he headed Disney’s content sales and streaming businesses in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
Problems he faced included: the show’s central theme of a shadowy political power broker, which was considered toxic by risk-averse local channels; a per episode budget double that of most Japanese TV; and assembling a team of writers, directors and actors willing to make the lengthy – but potentially lucrative – commitment to working in a western fashion on a recurring series.
Directed by Ishii Yuya (“The Great Passage”), Matsumoto Yusaku (“Noise”) and Mori Yoshitaka (“Space Brothers”) and starring veteran Tanaka Min (“The Twilight Samurai”) and Mackenyu (“Rurouni Kenshin: Final Chapter”), “House of the Owl” releases on April 24.
Below, Shin speaks with Variety about bringing “House of the Owl” to life.
With “House of the Owl,” what are you trying to do differently from regular Japanese TV?
Japanese shows can be very slow, plodding and not even very well-lit. Asia just never does recurring seasons, they only do miniseries. And this was deliberately done as a recurring season ensemble piece, like all the big shows in the U.S.
There were a lot of challenges to doing that. Actors don’t sign up for those kinds of projects. Getting people to script it was very hard, with a season of 10 episodes and all these characters. Getting three directors, who are all film directors, to start operating like staff directors was incredibly hard.
Why do you think the miniseries model dominates in Asia?
Everything is a miniseries. And even if there is a Season 2, it’s a miniseries with a second season. It’s not recurring. And whenever I tell this to people in L.A., they’re shocked and want to know how anyone makes money or builds a sustainable business.
Film has traditionally been a director’s medium. And television in the U.S. has always been a writer’s medium. But in Asia, television has always been an actor’s medium. They jump from show to show. And everything is greenlit based on who the actor is. That in turn is controlled by the talent agencies.
It is incredibly hard to do a recurring series, because they don’t want to give that kind of power to someone who owns them and locks them in for multiple seasons.
And when actors [in Japan] sign up to do dramas, their fees are actually really low. They make their money on TV commercials. They’re incentivized to show their face in a TV drama that highlights their personal appeal and then get, say 10 commercials from Toyota. Most of them are not simply actors, most of them are what the Japanese call “talentos.” They sing, they dance, they act, they emcee, they sports emcee, they do everything.
Was screenwriting an issue too?
To the Korean companies’ credit, they have a lot more focus on production values and a lot more focus on writing. Series are a writer’s medium in Korea. They’re paying top dollars for writers, when Japan and the rest of Asia barely pays writers. As a screenwriter in Japan, there’s no way to make a living unless you’re doing five dramas a year, working for TBS and just cranking out shows.
When did you decide to try to break the rules with this show?
Netflix has been the only company who’s been trying quite so hard in Japan [to take the recurring series route]. “Alice in Borderland” is probably the closest they’ve got to achieving that. It’s got that horror game element to do recurring seasons with. But I doubt it was ever actually intended to be that. [The underlying IP for ‘Alice’ was exhausted after two seasons. Its third season was original material.]
My pitch for this began with Muramoto Rieko, the former president of Avex Entertainment, 10 years ago, before any of the streamers got interested in Japan, when I told her that I wanted to make something like “House of Cards.” She was wonderful and made the pilot for about $900,000 at a time when the threshold for making [Japanese] drama was more like $300,000 to $400,000 per episode. We made it without “talentos” because we needed actors who could really fit the roles. Our test scores came back with 91% approval, but Avex could not go ahead with it and told me to shop it around.
Many companies loved it, but it was a very Japanese thing that they didn’t want to adopt someone else’s theories. [Eventually, after he worked at Disney, Shin got a season order for the show that he would produce through his new Iconique Pictures.]
Now that “House of the Owl” is completed, are you still confident that the Hollywood approach can work in Asia?
People are going to have to see the show. And the question will be, “Is it compelling?” But structurally, it’s got all the elements necessary to go five seasons. And that’s one of the major reasons Disney greenlighted it.
The other thing is that we have this plethora of Japanese content: “Tokyo Vice,” “Shogun.” And we’ve seen samurai and yakuza and ninjas. But we’ve never seen a Japanese show with a main character, a fixer, the power behind the power. Japanese even has a word, “kuromaku,” for this kind of person.
What is Iconique doing next?
We are working actively on two projects: one film, one series. The film is like “The Shining,” but set in Japan, where we have these people stuck in the Japanese Alps. They’re in this beautiful ancient “ryokan” [guest house] and they find out it’s haunted. We’re doing it in the Blumhouse style, bringing back J-horror a little bit, making it look really beautiful and getting into the psychology too. That one we are fully financing ourselves and taking out the indie route.
The other thing is a totally fictionalized samurai epic. It’s more like “Game of Thrones” with Shakespearean drama; speed up the acting [compared with conventional Japanese performances]; good, real actors; speed up the editing; match it with operatic music and world class VFX; and make it look like “Gladiator.” And, having seen “Shogun” do so well, I think this could potentially capture global audiences.
We’ve written the first episode and drafted the first season. I’ve already got a Japanese streamer very interested. But I want to keep international rights. And so, I’m trying to bring in an investor who will take international rights with me, and we’ll do it the way that they did with “Tokyo Vice” where Endeavor [now known as Fifth Season] came in, took part in the rights and resold them globally.
I want to keep making tentpole types of shows. Like “Game of Thrones,” but with Asian IP. I think that’s my sweet spot.
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