Last Wednesday, I opened a movie ticketing app and stopped, my finger in midair. The film opening that day was titled ‘Hope’. A director returning after ten years; a production budget of 70 billion won, the largest in the history of Korean cinema; the main competition at Cannes. On day one alone, 330,000 admissions — the best opening of the year. 1.22 million in three days. So far, the familiar numbers of a successful film.
But this film carried one circumstance that is not familiar at all. The parent company of its distributor, and the cinema chain it was showing in, are both currently inside court rehabilitation. The ticket money the audience pays flows across a net called rehabilitation claims. And the owner of that net was a group that held more of the chain than any company this book has traveled through.
The Group That Had the Whole Chain
Spread out JoongAng Group's chain and it looks like this. A newspaper (the JoongAng Ilbo), a broadcaster (JTBC), content production (SLL and the labels beneath it), and cinemas and film distribution (Megabox and, inside it, its distribution brand Plus M). From the birth of a news story to the making of a drama to a film going up on screens, nearly every joint that a piece of content passes through was gathered under one roof. All through Part 3, I went looking for companies that held one link of a chain. This group held not one link but all of them.
By the proposition of Part 3, this group should have been the richest of all. If value pools at the concentrated link of the chain, then the one who owns every link ought to be overflowing with it. Instead, in June 2026, the exact opposite happened.
A Fuse of 20.6 Billion Won
On June 12, JTBC failed to repay borrowings of 20.6 billion won. Against the group's total debt of 2.8 trillion won, it was less than 1%. But this small hole brought everything down. Because the affiliates were entangled — guaranteeing one another's debts, lending one another money — one company's delinquency became, domino-fashion, grounds for early repayment of everything else. Two days later, four companies including the holding company filed for court rehabilitation, and the next day JTBC joined them. On June 30, the court decided to commence rehabilitation proceedings for the four companies. The newspaper applied to its creditor banks for a workout, and 22 billion won of its commercial paper was dishonored.
Megabox's debt ratio had reached 2,212% on a consolidated basis, and its interest expense for a single year had grown larger than its total equity. Set out in a table it reads dryly, but in short the story is this. The entire chain was propping itself up on mutual debt, and when the single thinnest strand snapped, the whole of it came down together. Join four weak links and you do not get a strong chain. You get a long fuse.
At Every Joint, Value Was Leaking
Why did value pool at none of the joints? Walk through them one by one and the answer shows itself.
The newspaper's courtyard — advertising — dried up long ago. And the broadcaster? JTBC's revenue slid within a few years from 438.1 billion won to 373.7 billion, and in 2022, to raise liquidity, it handed 279 intellectual-property rights to its variety shows and dramas over to an affiliate for 43.3 billion won. The one asset where value could still have pooled — the IP — it bailed out with its own hands. And yet, look into the ledger and there is one odd line. Last year, the broadcaster's own operations, on a standalone basis, had turned back to a profit of 3.2 billion won. The body itself had begun to earn again, and the group's debt swallowed it.
Production is a repetition of a landscape this book has already seen. The production company behind Culinary Class Wars, which reached No. 1 in worldwide viewing, is an affiliate of this group. But production supplied to a global platform is contracted at cost plus a margin of around 10–20%, and the upside of a hit, along with the IP, belongs to the platform. Just as Korea Alcohol Industrial held the market and still could not name a price, the production house makes a global hit and still cannot name a price. A colder example came early this year. ‘The Man Who Lives with the King’, co-produced by one of the group's labels, passed 16 million admissions — the second-largest box office in history. That same quarter, the production affiliate posted an operating loss. Distribution belonged to another company, and production was not a margin but a passage. It is not that the hit failed to save the group; the structure was such that the value of a hit never flowed through this group's joints in the first place.
And then the cinemas. A courtyard that drew 220 million admissions a year before the pandemic has shrunk to around 100 million, and all three cinema chains are in the red. Here value is not so much leaking as the courtyard itself has folded in half.
Same Chain, Different Fate — CJ as the Control Group
What is interesting is that there is one more group with exactly this kind of vertical integration. CJ. Its structure — investment and distribution (CJ ENM) held together with cinemas (CGV) — resembles JoongAng's, and CGV too ran losses of hundreds of billions of won a year. But CJ held on. The difference lay not inside the chain but outside it. CJ had the old cash cows we met in Part 2 of this book — sugar and flour and logistics — and with that money it transfused 1 trillion won into its cinemas. JoongAng's chain had no such outside. Newspaper, broadcaster, cinema — every one was an industry whose courtyard was drying up, and the money they lent one another looked like a transfusion but was in fact the fuse.
The Proof, Standing on Its Head
All through Part 3, I kept confirming the same proposition. Value pools at the most concentrated link of the chain. 71% of bonding equipment; the transformer bottleneck; the 98.5% recovery rate that scrapes even the dregs. JoongAng Group proves the reverse side of that proposition. Even if you own the whole chain, if there is not one narrow link in it that nobody else can replace, nothing pools. The newspaper could be replaced by the portals, the broadcaster by OTT, production by the platforms, the cinema by the living-room sofa. Four walls — and on every one of them, the door stood wide open.
I set down the numbers for this group's people as well. This time, though, I decided not to do the per-employee arithmetic. The group's true numbers are being counted again, right now, by the examiners of the rehabilitation court, and that answer will appear in their report this winter.
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Status (July 2026) |
|---|
| Contentree JoongAng (production, listed) | About 790 | In the 60-million-won range | Rehabilitation proceedings commenced |
| Megabox JoongAng (cinemas, distribution) | 1,222 (about 505 regular staff) | Estimated in the 50-million-won range (regular staff) | Rehabilitation proceedings commenced · debt ratio 2,212% |
| JTBC (broadcasting) | 540 | 64.61 million won | In autonomous restructuring talks |
※ JTBC figures are from its annual report (end of 2025: 461 regular and 79 fixed-term staff; average tenure about four years). Megabox figures are from Fair Trade Commission and National Pension disclosures (the 1,222 includes on-site cinema staff; tenure undisclosed). Contentree figures are rough estimates from job-search portals. Results and debts are being recalculated in the rehabilitation proceedings.
Hope
Back, then, to that film. Fifteen days after rehabilitation proceedings commenced, the group's distributor released the most expensive film ever made in Korea. At Cannes it had been pre-sold to some 200 countries for the highest sum in Korean film history, and even counting those pre-sales, break-even is estimated at around 7 million domestic admissions. The press wrote that the company's survival was riding on this release. The last ship floated by a drowning group. And the name of that ship, of all things, is ‘Hope’.
Between wanting the film to succeed, and knowing that even if it does, there is no telling where the money will pool, I hovered for a moment, finger over the booking button. Outside the cinema, the small distributors and crews whose settlement money was frozen in this chain were petitioning the government. At the far end of a chain, the thinnest joints always dry first.
By the time this is read, the court will have settled on an answer for the broadcaster's fate as well. Either way, what this journey set out to confirm has already been confirmed. A wall makes value not out of quantity but out of narrowness. The one who had the whole chain fell first.
And with that, the value chain journey is over. We looked at the walls one by one, saw how they are kept by many hands together, saw the plumbing beneath them, and walked the chains that join them to the very end. If owning every wall was not enough to survive, then what we need now is not a list of walls but the questions for reading them. In the final chapter, we pack up those questions and head home.
This piece is part of the "Korea Value Chain" series and is an original work. It is an analysis based on public data and press reports; matters concerning the ongoing rehabilitation proceedings may change as the facts develop. Some figures and assessments are estimates. It is not intended as a direct basis for investment decisions.
By Alexandro Lee · July 2026
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