Webtoons are digital comics that originated in South Korea in the early 2000s. Unlike traditional comics, they are designed for small screens: the reader scrolls down one frame at a time, rather than scanning multiple frames across a page. Episodes are short, taking as little as five minutes to read—a product of Korean "snack culture", which promotes media consumption in morsels of 15 minutes or less.
In 2024 the webtoons market was worth $9bn; it is projected to reach nearly $100bn by 2033, according to IMARC, a consultancy. That figure exceeds the projected market size of Japanese manga. Even Japanese readers have been ditching homegrown manga for the digital alternative: the highest-grossing app in Japan in the first quarter of 2025 was Line Manga, a webtoon platform. The Webtoon platform alone releases more than 120,000 new episodes every day.
Since 2020 more than ten webtoon stories have been adapted into films and television shows. Hollywood has been snapping up the rights to hit webtoons, with 20 shows in development as of 2025. LuckyChap, one of the production companies behind "Barbie" (2023), is working on a live-action film of "Stagtown". Skybound, which made "The Walking Dead", has picked up "Freaking Romance".
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