Korea's Video Rental Shops and Manhwabang: What Happened

For about twenty years, every Korean apartment block had a video store at the bottom of it. You knew the owner, the owner knew what you had rented, and you knew exactly how much you would owe if you kept a new release an extra night.

Next to it, or upstairs, there was usually a 만화방 (manhwabang), a comic-book room with a heater, a stack of instant ramen and a smell of cigarette smoke and old paper. Both are almost gone. One of them came back in a new form. The other did not.

This is Part 2 of our Vanished Seoul series.

When did Korea’s video rental boom happen?

From the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, and it happened fast.

Seoul’s own city magazine describes the video era as roughly twenty years starting in the mid-1980s, when VCRs became a household item. Rental was cheap: 1,000 to 2,000 won for most titles, and old films were often 500 won. The punishment for forgetting was a late fee at double the rental price, collected with a look.

At the peak, the shop count ran into the tens of thousands. A Korean reference wiki puts it at around 30,000 in the early 1990s, falling to about 20,000 by the end of the decade; Busan alone had more than 3,000 in 1995. National franchise chains such as 영화마을 (Movie Village) put a recognisable sign on every other street.

What was a video bang?

A private cinema by the hour. By the mid-1990s, video rooms, 비디오방 (bidio-bang), were spreading through university areas and city centres. A 1995 Daegu MBC report said they had appeared in Daegu about a year earlier and already numbered about 80 there, each with 10 to 19 small rooms, a wall of 1,200 to 2,000 tapes, and queues after 3pm. At the time there was not yet a specific regulation for them, so they operated on ordinary rental licences.

They made sense in a country where young people lived with their parents until marriage and apartments were small. A video room gave a couple, or a group of friends, a sofa and a screen with a door that closed. That, naturally, is also why they acquired a reputation.

When DVDs arrived they became DVD방 (DVD bang). Legally they are a “video viewing business”, restricted to adults and barred from operating near schools. A third-party map built on local licensing data listed about 334 such businesses nationwide in January 2025, not all of them necessarily still open.

Why did video rental shops disappear so fast?

Because Korea got fast internet before almost anyone else, and it got it everywhere at once.

The sequence ran like this. DVDs arrived in the early 2000s and made the tape stock worthless overnight. Broadband made film downloads, legal and very much otherwise, routine for anyone under thirty. Digital cable and then IPTV, which launched commercially in late 2008, put a rental shop inside the TV remote. Smartphones finished the job. According to Edaily’s 2013 analysis of Statistics Korea data, the number of rental employees fell from 23,551 to 1,579 over the same 2000 to 2011 period, and IPTV’s film-on-demand business grew from about 20 billion won in 2009 to about 130 billion won in 2012.

A Korean reference wiki dates the last Korean VHS releases to 2011. When Edaily went looking for Movie Village stores in Seoul in 2019, it found six or seven still listed on portal maps and only one that answered the phone, renting martial-arts novels to regulars in their thirties and forties with the DVDs in storage.

What is a manhwabang, and how did it change?

It is the comic-book room, and it has had three lives.

📚 Three generations of paying to read comics

The Hankook Ilbo traced this arc in 2015, noting that the rental-only publishing model of the early decades produced a lot of rushed work, and that the book rental shops of the 1990s survived into the 2000s by adding novels, videos and DVDs as webtoons and scanned files ate their comics business.

The numbers fell in parallel with video. Korea’s content industry survey counted 902 manhwa rental businesses in 2010 and 746 in 2014; book rental businesses renting comics dropped from 3,132 to 2,421 over the same period. Kyunghyang Shinmun put all comic rental businesses at 4,800 in 2006 and 2,500 in 2019, of which 704 were manhwabang or manhwa cafés, and estimated that only about 500 small independents remained. Print was shrinking too: new comics published in Korea fell from 7.85 million copies in 2018 to 5.67 million in 2020, according to the Korean Publishers Association.

The old style survives too, just about. An owner interviewed by Kyunghyang in 2021 was charging 8,000 won for an all-day stay and had cut his monthly spending on new titles from 2 million to 700,000 won. The digital side of the story, how Korean comics moved to the phone and then to Netflix, is in our guide to the webtoon industry.

Where can you still read manhwa by the hour in Seoul?

Manhwa cafés are easy: search 만화카페 in Naver Map near any university station and you will find several. The old-school independents are rarer. These two were still running when Esquire Korea visited in September 2026.

Daebak Manhwabang (대박만화방), Seokchon-dong, Songpa. A 24-hour comic room run in shifts by a husband and wife, 21 years in business, with a deep stock of out-of-print classics and home-cooked meals such as kimchi stew, according to Esquire Korea. A short walk from Seokchon Station, and a strange contrast with Lotte World Tower up the road.

📍 Open in Naver Map

Murim Manhwa Café (무림만화카페), Jonggak. Open since 2016 and built around martial-arts comics, with a whole shelf for Urasawa Naoki, per the same Esquire feature. The name means “martial world”, which tells you the shelf priorities.

📍 Open in Naver Map

A reconstructed one. The National Folk Museum of Korea’s outdoor “7080 Memory Street”, in the Gyeongbokgung grounds, includes a period comic room, Kkureogi Manhwabang, alongside a stationery shop and snack bar. Parts of the street can close in rain.

📍 Open in Naver Map

For the full history, the Korea Manhwa Museum in Bucheon, west of Seoul, runs a comics museum and a large comics library, open 10am to 6pm and closed Mondays, with general admission at 5,000 won.

The manhwabang and the video room belonged to the same Korea as the PC bang and the noraebang: a country of small homes that rents out rooms by the hour for whatever you cannot do in the living room. The PC bang and the noraebang are thriving. The video room is not. The difference is whether the internet could deliver the thing itself.