It was specifically Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk that my friends outside the arthose/festival circuit rejected at the time, though, for example Seom or even Ol

It was specifically Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk that my friends outside the arthose/festival circuit rejected at the time, though, for example Seom or even Old-boy, as "too foreign". I think the internet- and streaming-driven globalization of media & subsequent exposure have definitely reduced the sort of knee-jerk inhibitions against watching something where the entire cast of characters is non-Western, or something subtitled. Content outside the Western bubble has increasingly lost the "this is a little strange and foreign" patina for average people in the millenials and younger gen. If you're below 25, and your fav sports team is perhaps an e-sports team from Korea rather than your local football club, you may not even realize people really, broadly used to think like that. When I was young, it was nearly impossible to watch a non-dubbed movie in theaters in Germany unless you lived in a major city, and even then it would be a special screening stuffed into an 11pm slot for the nerds. Which meant that content that didn't get dubbed would never be seen, and hardly anything not from Hollywood or major European countries would get dubbed. Now a big chunk of the programming in any theater is "original audio" screenings and it's no longer something that strikes people as odd to attend at all. Many countries' cinemas now get to contend in the market.