Lee Soo Man: King of K-pop (2025)

A new documentary ostensibly on SM Entertainment founder Lee Soo Man just premiered on Amazon Prime. The documentary was directed by Ting Poo, who says she knew nothing about K-Pop before starting the project. Unfortunately, that ignorance comes through in spades over the run time of the film.

There are a number of major problems with Lee Soo Man: King of K-Pop so let’s get right to it.

First of all, the documentary could not make its mind up about the narrative it wanted to tell. Is this a film about Lee Soo Man, the man? Is it about Lee Soo Man, the K-Pop Svengali? Is it about K-Pop more generally as an art form? Or is it about SM Entertainment, the company? The narrative jumps between copious footage of Lee Soo Man puttering around studio control rooms in 2022 to free floating contextless music videos from various SM artists to various talking head “experts” and then to CGI visualizations of Lee Soo Man pontificating about nonsense like he’s holding court with a bunch of undergraduate students late at night in a bar or coffee shop. It’s a confusing mess and I pity the normie viewer attempting to make sense of it all.

Where the documentary is strongest is when it focuses on Lee Soo Man, the person. The sections where he is talking about his late wife, his parents, or his early career as a singer were straightforward and compelling. It was frustrating, as a viewer, to get glimpses into Lee Soo Man’s personal life, only to cut to some talking head “explaining” contemporary K-Pop or Lee Soo Man striding through a CGI desert with a half-baked metaphor about Moses leading the Israelites that goes nowhere.

It didn’t help that the filming of the documentary appears to have coincided with Lee Soo Man’s ousting from SM Entertainment and the battle between mega-corps Hybe and Kakao for control of the company. While in theory, this might make for a fascinating Succession or Billions-style drama, in practice it led to a muddled narrative where for 75% of the documentary, we’re led to believe that Lee Soo Man is some kind of Wizard In Residence at SM Entertainment personally attending recording sessions for the various NCTs and Aespa and approving every single song released by the company. Then in a rushed finale, he’s ousted somehow?? And his nephew who’d we been introduced to for 30 seconds earlier in the film suddenly has a heel turn and becomes a Big Bad Villain?? I don’t see how any of this could make sense to a viewer who hadn’t been following the board room drama as it unfolded when even I had trouble following the muddled narrative the film gave us.

This muddled sense of storytelling comes up again and again whenever the film pivots away from Lee Soo Man, the man, telling his own story, and into speed running through SM Entertainment company history. The history of SM Entertainment is, in many ways, the history of K-Pop itself, which is why it’s a huge problem that Ting Poo knows nothing about K-Pop. We get glaring omissions, half truths, and bizarre jumps in the timeline. 

Hyun Jin Young archival footage makes an appearance (!) but the man himself is nowhere to be found. Gee, why would a documentary team want to hear from one of the early K-Pop stars? Especially one who performed in the United States way back in the 1990s and certainly could have spoken to the scene in Seoul as Lee Soo Man was starting out in producing? 

The film jumps directly from “Hyun Jin Young bankrupted the company” to “H.O.T. have conquered China and everything is going swimmingly for SM Entertainment” to “If teenage BOA doesn’t do well in Japan, the company is over.” 

Wha-wha-what???? How did that happen? Which, not to harp on this, but it’s just so clear that the level of K-Pop history knowledge at work here is zero. 

BOA is also presented in a bizarre ahistorical context. In Japan, she was a mid-tier vocal diva alongside the heavy hitters of the time like Hamasaki Ayumi. She did very well in Japan, especially for a Korean singer, but she remained at a respectable mid-tier popularity. In Korea, she was known for being popular in Japan and people were rightfully proud of that. However, she did not “set the standard for female soloists.” The person who did that was Lee Hyori (of Fin.K.L.) and whose style in songs like “Ten Minutes” echoed through the generations.

 TVXQ gets a bizarre storyline where “Mirotic” (!!!!!!) is presented as this huge hit in Japan that leads directly to JYJ splitting from TVXQ because they were greedy and wanted to form their own group (????????) I mean, what?????? 

Did “Mirotic” get released as a single in Japan? Yes. Was it this huge megahit there? No. In fact, “Mirotic” was specifically a Korean release for the Korean fans who’d been patiently waiting for TVXQ to return back from Japan. 

To me it seemed like TVXQ, SHINee, and f(x) are only mentioned so that the documentary can set up the DARK SIDE OF K-POP messaging (slave contracts! suicide!) in order for Lee Soo Man and the talking head experts to refute it.

Is it a fair point that suicide is a problem in Korean society more generally, not just in K-pop? Absolutely. 

Is it appropriate to suddenly cut to footage from an artist’s funeral, context free, in the middle of a frothy documentary in order to make sure we know that Lee Soo Man isn’t personally responsible for the beloved artist’s death? No. 

Shinhwa isn’t mentioned; neither is Girls Generation. Let alone earlier acts like S.E.S.
Super Junior pops up out of nowhere in 2009 with “Sorry, Sorry” and then vanishes.

And nothing is said about the actual artistry on display. The music, the singing, the dancing. We get a painful metaphor for K-pop being like bibimbap at the top of the film (set over a Girls Generation song) but nothing specific. Yoo Young Jin gets to show his face on screen but nobody asks him about the SM Production sound. Sure, TVXQ’s infamous “Rising Sun” hairstyles make an appearance but “Rising Sun” itself? Absolute silence. Where were LDN Noise? Dem Jointz? Hell, where was Min Hee-Jin?

Instead of talking to Hyun Jin Young or to guys like Koo Jun-Yup (Clon), the members of S.E.S., etc. we’re treated to sound bites from 2022-era trainees at SM about what an honor it is to be there. Maybe the production team of the documentary didn’t know enough to know to find those older figures nor what questions to ask if they did find them. 

The impression I got is that this documentary was intended to be a puff piece for 2022 SM Entertainment, complete with plenty of screen time for the various NCTs and Aespa. The half-assed “SM history” is just filler, meant to pad out the run time and establish SM Entertainment’s bona fides in an English-language publicity market dominated by Hybe née BigHit. Don’t think it escaped my notice that the most unflattering footage of Hybe founder Bang Shi-Hyuk was used nor that Hybe’s favorite totem to establish their bona fides (Seo Taiji and Boys) went unmentioned.

Unless you really care about Lee Soo Man’s dorm room philosophy of cultural technology and want to see CGI footage of his avatar dancing, then you can safely give this documentary a hard pass. What a waste of time and energy.

Normies curious about SM Entertainment would be better served by just dialing up random music videos from SM Entertainment artists over the years.

Take a trip to the SM Garage and sit back and enjoy some quality tunes!