One Hit, No Follow-Up: The Invisible Wall Stopping Asian Films From Becoming Franchises in America

It happens like clockwork. A Thai action thriller or a Vietnamese supernatural drama breaks through in the US, racks up impressive streaming numbers, lands on everyone's "hidden gems" list, and floods diaspora group chats with the same message: when is part two coming?

The answer, almost always, is never.

This isn't a coincidence or a creative choice. It's a systemic problem baked into how the American entertainment industry handles foreign-language content — and it's one of the most frustrating patterns for Asian cinema fans living in the States.

The Numbers Game Nobody's Winning

Here's the basic math problem. When a Hollywood film like Spider-Man or Fast & Furious performs well domestically, the studio that greenlit it also owns the sequel rights, controls the marketing infrastructure, and has every financial incentive to keep the franchise going. The money flows in a circle.

With Asian films, that circle is broken from the start.

A Korean production company makes a film. An American distributor licenses it — often for a limited theatrical run or a streaming window. That distributor might make decent money. But the sequel rights? Those stay with the original studio, sitting in Seoul or Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh City. The American distributor has no reason to fund a sequel they don't own. And the original studio has no reliable American partner to co-finance one.

So the film sits there, successful and stranded.

"The licensing model is fundamentally incompatible with franchise building," one independent distributor told a film industry panel last year. "You're essentially renting someone else's IP for a window, making money off it, and then handing it back. Nobody builds a house on rented land."

Risk Aversion Wearing a Respectful Mask

American studios and streamers have gotten very good at appearing enthusiastic about Asian cinema without actually betting on it. They'll acquire a buzzy film, promote it during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, maybe drop it into a curated collection — and call it a day.

Actual franchise investment? That requires a different kind of commitment. It means co-producing, not just licensing. It means marketing a sequel to an American audience that may or may not remember the original. It means trusting that the diaspora audience — and the growing number of non-Asian viewers who've crossed the subtitle barrier — will show up again.

Most executives aren't willing to take that bet, even when the first film's numbers justify it. The logic, frustratingly, goes something like: it worked once, but lightning doesn't strike twice with foreign content. That assumption would be laughed out of the room if anyone applied it to a domestic franchise. But for Asian films, it passes without challenge.

The Rare Exceptions That Broke Through

It's not a completely bleak picture. A handful of franchises have managed to build real momentum in the American market, and it's worth understanding how.

The IP Man series is probably the clearest success story. Donnie Yen's martial arts franchise built a genuine American fanbase across multiple films, partly because the action genre travels well and partly because Well Go USA committed to consistent distribution over years, not just a one-off licensing deal. Consistency mattered enormously.

The Thai Bangkok Dangerous and its predecessor had modest crossover, though it was eventually remade rather than continued — which is a whole other conversation about Hollywood's tendency to absorb rather than amplify.

More recently, some Korean films distributed through Netflix have started to generate sequel conversations that actually go somewhere, precisely because Netflix owns the global rights from day one. When the platform is also the producer, the franchise math suddenly works. Train to Busan producer Yeon Sang-ho got to make Peninsula partly because the streaming era had started to reshape who holds the rights.

But these are exceptions that prove the rule.

What Diaspora Audiences Actually Want

For Vietnamese-Americans, Filipino-Americans, and other diaspora communities watching through platforms like PhimMoiZ, the franchise gap isn't just an abstract industry problem. It's personal.

Think about what it means to finally see your parents' home country represented in a film that gets real distribution in the US. You recommend it to your American coworkers. You watch it with your kids. And then it just... ends. No continuation. No expanded universe. No sense that this story was important enough to keep telling.

Compare that to how American audiences experience Marvel or John Wick or any number of domestic franchises. Those films signal investment. They say: this world matters, these characters matter, we're coming back. Asian films that break through in America almost never get to send that message.

That asymmetry shapes how casual American viewers perceive Asian cinema — as a source of one-off discoveries rather than sustained storytelling universes worth following.

The Co-Production Path Forward

The most realistic route to changing this dynamic runs through co-production deals, not licensing arrangements. When an American studio or streamer has equity in a film from the beginning — not just distribution rights — they have skin in the game for what comes next.

We're starting to see more of these arrangements, especially between Korean studios and global streamers. But for Southeast Asian cinema, including Vietnamese, Thai, and Filipino productions, the co-production infrastructure is still thin. The relationships haven't been built. The legal frameworks across different national film industries are complicated. And frankly, American studios still underestimate the audience.

Grassroots pressure matters here more than people realize. When diaspora audiences make noise — through streaming numbers, through social media, through showing up at limited theatrical runs — it creates data points that distributors and studios actually pay attention to. The argument for sequels is always easier to make when someone can point to a number.

The Conversation Is Starting

There are encouraging signs. Asian-American filmmakers who grew up on these movies are now inside Hollywood studios and streaming platforms, making the case for franchise investment from the inside. Film festivals are increasingly framing Asian cinema not as a curiosity but as a source of IP with genuine long-term commercial potential.

And audiences are more vocal than ever. The fans who flooded comment sections demanding a The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil sequel, or who kept pushing for more content from the universe of Along with the Gods, aren't just expressing enthusiasm. They're making a market argument.

The invisible wall isn't permanent. But knocking it down requires the American entertainment industry to stop treating Asian cinema as a collection of one-time events and start treating it as something worth building on — the same way it treats literally everything else that makes money.

Until then, diaspora audiences will keep asking the same question in the same group chats.

When is part two coming?