Why a blockbuster director went vertical

Short-form videos have become such a ubiquitous part of everyday media consumption that the format itself is hardly a conversation starter — if not to talk about how addicting they are and whether people should spend less time doom-scrolling. But when Lee Joon-ik, the prominent director behind features like “King and the Clown” (2005) ventured into short-form content, audiences and the industry took notice.

Lee makes his debut in the vertical short-form drama format with “My Father's Table,” a family drama adapted from Gorita's popular webtoon of the same name. With a runtime of 156 minutes in total, the film was created to be watched in roughly two-minute installments on Lezhin Snack, a short-drama app where viewers swipe to move from one episode to the next. 

The director, speaking at a press screening for “My Father’s Table” at Lotte Cinema’s World Tower branch in Seoul on Thursday, called it an “experimental” project. Though the drama was conceived as a 61-episode short-form series, the episodes have been stitched together for a limited theatrical release at Lotte Cinema beginning Wednesday, before the series is released episodically from Sept. 17 on Lezhin Snack. 

The segmented format meant each roughly two-minute installment needed its own miniature arc, with enough momentum to carry viewers into the next episode, Lee said. The narrow frame also changed how he composed scenes.

“If you look at paintings from the past several centuries, horizontal works are mostly landscapes […] while vertical ones tend to be portraits,” he said. “With a vertical frame, each character can feel almost like a portrait. You can look much more deeply into a person’s inner world, almost as if you’re peering in on them. It can feel far more intimate.”

“Even watching [the screening] today, I’m discovering new things. As a director, there’s very little I can confidently claim to know or explain about all of this yet,” he added.

The renowned filmmaker’s entry into short-form comes amid a broader conversation over shrinking attention spans and what constant exposure to bite-size media is doing to the way audiences watch content. Directors including James Cameron have argued that fragmented, multitasking viewing habits are making sustained attention for long features harder to come by.

It also comes with a certain stigma. Short-form video has grown rapidly on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, where content is often produced quickly and at scale, and associated with sensational storytelling or in more niche genres. The rise of generative AI has only added to the flood, making the videos cheaper and easier to produce while reinforcing the perception that the format is disposable. 

“I asked [Lee] many questions, but deep down, there was only one I really wanted to ask: Why had a director behind a 10-million-admissions blockbuster chosen to make a short-form drama?” critic Bae Dong-mi wrote in film magazine Cine21.

Lee said the shift toward vertical, mobile-first content was becoming hard for filmmakers to ignore as theatergoing declined and more viewing moved to phones.

In a 2024 OpenSurvey poll, 82.7 percent of Koreans aged between 15 and 59 said they had watched short-form content, up from 68.9 percent a year earlier and 56.5 percent in 2022. A 2025 survey by the Korea Creative Content Agency (Kocca) found that 58.6 percent of Koreans aged 10 and older consumed short-form content. Among users of free streaming services such as YouTube, viewers also preferred original short-form videos to clips repurposed from longer content, according to a 2024 survey by Kocca.

But Lee also framed short-form as a lower-cost entry point for filmmakers, particularly as Korea's film industry struggles with a prolonged investment slump. Crews are leaner, shooting schedules are shorter and productions require less extensive sets and equipment.

“My Father’s Table” was made for about 500 million won ($370,000), Lee said, compared to roughly 150 million won for an average short-form drama. He estimated that making the same project as a horizontal feature would have cost at least five times as much.

Lezhin Snack’s investment in “My Father’s Table” — a project that lead actor Jung Jin-young said was “not, by its nature, a film expected to generate major box-office returns” — is part of a broader push into short-form content, as major entertainment companies launch new labels, line up more titles and strike distribution deals. Streaming platform Tving started producing original short-form dramas last year, followed by broadcaster MBC, while companies including Pan Entertainment and KT Studio Genie have since joined the market.

Lezhin's app launched in February in Korea, the United States and Japan, marketing itself as a premium short-drama platform that would pair Lezhin Comics’ existing webtoon intellectual property with established filmmakers.

Korea's major studio Showbox, meanwhile, launched a dedicated label, Showbite, this month, with plans to release about 20 titles by the end of the year. The company also signed a co-production deal with ReelShort, a global short-form drama platform that operates in more than 100 countries and has over 70 million monthly active users.

The growing competition around short-form has spawned its own awards circuit. The inaugural Korea Short Drama Awards, co-hosted by Cineplay and the Korean Film Archive, were held Aug. 29, with Lee Ju-seung’s “She Lives Upstairs” taking the top prize.

“Just because the production is small doesn’t mean the story has to be small,” Lee Joon-ik said at the Thursday event. “A smaller production can actually bring greater density and focus to the storytelling.”

BY KIM JU-YEON [[email protected]]