Horror stands out as a natural meeting ground for Taiwanese and Indonesian producers, according to a K7 Media study of the Indonesian film and TV market presented by Trang Nguyen at Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF) in Taipei. The stakes are considerable. Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s largest economy and its biggest film market, with box office revenue of $352.9 million in 2025, according to figures drawn from PwC, Box Office Mojo and CJ CGV Vietnam.
That is 1.6 times the size of Vietnam’s box office and five times Thailand’s. The market’s 5.1% compound annual growth rate also beats the Asia-Pacific average of 4.3%. Local films rule the multiplexes.
Indonesian titles made up 201, or 43%, of 2025 releases but took 64% of admissions, with 82.6 million tickets sold, per Cinepoint data via the Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM). That is more than double the 36.9 million admissions for the 100 U.S. releases. Other Asian imports barely registered: 27 Japanese films drew 3.3 million admissions, while 61 Korean and 16 Chinese titles each pulled in 2 million.
Three local titles sit in the 10 million-plus club: Imajinari’s 2025 comedy “Agak Laen: Menyala Pantiku!,” Visinema’s 2025 animated fantasy adventure “Jumbo” and MD Pictures’ 2022 horror “KKN di Desa Penari.” Horror is the genre Indonesia produces most for cinemas. Five of the 10 most-attended Indonesian films since 2011 are horror pictures, and recent hits have mixed scares with comedy or drama. Many of the country’s horror films draw on existing IP.
Foreign horror can break out too. Korean hit “Exhuma” drove up local theatrical interest in Korean films after its 2024 run. The presentation singled out “The Rope Curse 4” as a recent Taiwan-Indonesia collaboration.
Remakes form a second route. The Indonesian version of Korean film “Miracle in Cell No. 7” sold around 5.8 million tickets in 2022 and went on to generate a new sequel plus an animated offshoot. Adaptations need not be film-to-film: a local big-screen version of “Descendants of the Sun,” the 2016 Korean series, is in production for cinemas in 2027.
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