Unbounded creativity

From Buenos Aires to Busan, Lagos to Lahore, new cultural powerhouses are reshaping how “global” looks, and who gets to define it. According to Brand Finance’s “Global Soft Power Index 2025,” China has climbed to second in the ranking, overtaking the United Kingdom, while the United Arab Emirates has retained 10th position. South Korea is now the fastest-growing soft-power nation among those ranked in the index’s top 100 last year, reflecting a world in which cultural exports—film, music, design, gaming—have become geopolitical capital.

The shift has been powerfully evident in 2026. Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny–already named Spotify’s most-streamed in 2025–headlined the coveted Super Bowl halftime slot in February performing entirely in Spanish. He also took home the Grammy for Best Album while K-Pop girl group Huntr/x also notched up success at the awards, scoring the genre’s first ever Grammy for “Golden.” Meanwhile at the Oscars, non-English language films received Academy award nominations in 16 categories, including two for Best Picture (Norway’s Sentimental Value and Brazil’s The Secret Agent).

On screen, breakout stories have increasingly been emerging from unexpected places. Argentina’s The Eternaut—a Netflix adaptation of the country’s beloved graphic novel of the same title—topped the platform’s Global Top 10 in April 2025, drawing praise for its grounding in Buenos Aires culture, complete with traditional mate drink, popular card game truco, and political allegory. China’s Ne Zha 2—a traditional Chinese myth adaptation from home-grown animation studio Chengdu CoCo Cartoon—became the highest-grossing animated film of all time (reportedly reaching over $2.2 billion), while K-Pop Demon Hunters set Netflix viewing records with 325.1 million streams by the end of September 2025. The film’s soundtrack is the first on the Billboard Hot 100 to have four of its songs simultaneously in the top 10.

A city skyline at dusk with a building wrapped by a billboard showing Bad Bunny as Global Top Artist 2025. — Bad Bunny, Spotify Wrapped 2025 Most Streamed Artist. Courtesy of Spotify.

At the 2025 Cannes Lions, this same shift was on full display. Grand Prix awards went to a diverse geographic slate—among them Puerto Rico, with DDB Latina Puerto Rico’s interactive campaign “Tracking Bad Bunny” for Rimas Entertainment winning the Grand Prix in the Entertainment Lions for Music category. The campaign invited fans to follow a scavenger hunt using Google Maps and Spotify clues to uncover hidden song titles across real locations. Puerto Rico’s first-ever Grand Prix win placed the island’s creativity on a global stage and earned praise for its originality, cultural authenticity, and global resonance.

Audiences are noting the shift: Eighty-three percent of gen Zers (and 76% overall) say they feel their cultural tastes are becoming more international over time because of wider access to content from around the world. For their part, creatives now aspire to compete on a level playing field while celebrating their cultural heritage.

“We used to admire creativity from abroad and think it was incredible,” says Jiao Zi, director and screenwriter of Ne Zha 2, in an interview with VML Intelligence. “Now we’ve realized that with hard work and perseverance, we can achieve the same level of excellence.”

Cover of the video game Black Myth Wukong featuring the head and shoulders of a monkey-like man in warrior's armour. — Black Myth: Wukong. Courtesy of Game Science

Maggie Kang, director and screenwriter of K-Pop Demon Hunters, tells VML Intelligence that she had always wanted to create “a story deeply rooted in my South Korean heritage—something that celebrates where I come from while resonating with audiences everywhere.”

The same rebalancing is transforming gaming. When Black Myth: Wukong, an action RPG developed by the Hangzhou-based studio Game Science, launched globally in August 2025, it became the first Chinese title to top Steam’s global sales chart and a mainstream sensation far beyond Asia. Inspired by the Chinese classic fantasy novel Journey to the West, it reimagines the Monkey King myth with cinematic depth and technical mastery.

“We didn’t want to imitate Western fantasies,” Feng Ji, CEO of Game Science, tells VML Intelligence. “We wanted to show the world that our mythology—our Sun Wukong—is just as rich and universal as any hero from Greece or Scandinavia. The response proved that global audiences are ready for stories told from our perspective.”

Feng added that the team deliberately prioritized authenticity over Westernization: “We brought in historians, martial artists, and traditional opera choreographers. Every movement, every gesture, carries Chinese cultural DNA, and that’s exactly what players connected with.”

The Intelligence Take

The world’s creative capital is shifting fast. For brands who want to speak fluently to a truly global audience, this means reimagining storytelling for a multipolar cultural landscape: one where Buenos Aires, Seoul and Shenzhen generate the references while the rest of the world follows.

For more on the trends that matter this year and beyond, download The Future 100: 2026

Main image: Bad Bunny was Spotify Wrapped’s most streamed global artist of 2025. Courtesy of Spotify