Title Pending 5933

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.The production of Korean TV dramas has doubled in numbers and quadrupled in scale in less than a decade (2016 – 2023) with the rise of global and local streaming video on demand services (SVODs). This paper takes a media industries and production culture approach to examine how producers and distributors of K-dramas increasingly have turned to webtoons as a source of creative original intellectual property (IP). K-drama’s initial inter-industrial mining of webtoon platforms gradually evolved to webtoon companies’ vertical integration to own the entire process of developing their properties into live-action series; a form the industry labels “super IP.” Drawing from interviews with industry professionals including local Korean television producers and distribution executives as well as industry discourse around the production and distribution of webtoon-adapted K-dramas, I illustrate how, since the mid-2010s, K-drama and webtoon companies have variably collaborated and competed to develop this super IP.