Byeon Woo Seok's fees reduced for Solo Leveling live action due to Netflix's decision to cap salaries?

The success of Lovely Runner made Byeon Woo-seok an overnight star in the Korean drama world. While he had done shows before, the global hit pushed his career towards an upwards trajectory. He is finalised as the lead of Solo Leveling live action movie commissioned by Netflix Korea. As we know, Korean content is one of the biggest money-spinners for the OTT giant. They have spent billions on shows like Sweet Home, All Of Us Are Dead, Squid Game, Queen Of Tears to name a few. One of the huge part of the costs is the fee of stars.

Byeon Woo Seok is going to play Sung Jin Woo in the Korean drama series adaptation of the popular novel, Solo Leveling. It seems he was chosen over Cha Eun-woo who is now in the military. As per the Korean news outlet, OSEN the actor might not take a staggering pay packet as it was expected after smash hit of Lovely Runner.

Netflix has decided to put a cap on fees demanded by actors who work in their projects. There are many Korean actors who have done a lot of projects for Netflix Korea like Song Kang, Han So-Hee, Woo Do-Hwan, Lee Jung-jae to name a few.

Byeon Woo-seok's fees reduced for Solo Leveling

It seems the top brass of the OTT platform has decided to lower pay cheques of Korean actors who work in we series, films bankrolled by them. It is now at 400 million KRW (290,000 USD) to 300 million KRW (220,000 USD) per episode. This is roughly around Rs 1.9 crores per episode, which is no small sum. As per OSEN, the initial payment for Byeon Woo-seok was said to be a lot higher, which is significantly lower now.

One of the best examples is that of Lee Jung Jae for Squid Game. From a fee of 245K per episode of the first season, he apparently demanded one million USD per episode for seasons two or three. The report left fans shocked. Kim Soo-Hyun the leading man of Queen Of Tears made USD 3.7 million from the superhit series. Some outlets claimed he was paid KRW 800 million for every episode.

Now, he cannot make more than USD 300K per episode of the show. However, people have refused to confirm this saying there is no such uniform cap as such.