The story at the South Korean box office for domestic films remains about as bleak as ever. Nothing has done well since The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure since Lunar New Year weekend. Although speaking of that movie, it might interest you to know that Netflix has scooped up the rights to it and if you really want to, you can watch the biggest South Korean film success of the year from the comfort of your own home.
Even The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure didn’t really do great, especially not by a pre-COVID-19 standard. And for what it’s worth, with more mainstream Hollywood releases that can be used as a comparison point, Spider-Man: No Way Home is increasingly appearing to be an aberration in terms of being a big success. The release of The Batman was the first release of a film based on a well-known American intellectual property in the South Korean market. And the response has been pretty lukewarm.
The Batman isn’t going to crack even a million admissions, and it only just barely managed to outperform Uncharted. Incidentally, Uncharted’s mediocre performance also means we can rule out Spider-Man: No Way Home as appealing to people based on Tom Holland. I don’t think anyone actually really thought that Tom Holland was why Spider-Man: No Way Home was so successful, but let’s be honest. Uncharted is a movie that seems to exist mainly to answer questions nobody ever asked.
The big recent bright spot for South Korean films is the current box office leader- In Our Prime, a movie about an old North Korean defector who used to be a math expert, and the high school student he forms a bond with. In Our Prime has the dubious distinction of having a needlessly punny title. Translated from Korean literally, In Our Prime has the much more enigmatic title of The Mathematician from Wonderland.
I don’t want to oversell In Our Prime’s success. When you crunch the numbers, it’s only pulling in about half of what The Batman did. But the sheer lack of blockbuster pretensions, centered around an emotional human drama of maladjusted life drama and North Korean defectors makes In Our Prime a fairly distinctive project. It’s very much the kind of genre movie you can only really make in South Korea, both because it’s so tightly wrapped up in South Korean social problems, but also because Hollywood is even further removed from these kinds of stories. So, there’s no real competition, and In Our Prime feels distinct and different for reasons beyond mere spectacle.
Contrast that with the latest release in the market- Moonfall, the latest from Roland Emmerich, and pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Incidentally Moonfall came out all the way back on February 4th in the United States. It’s not completely clear why the movie had such a long delay, only to be released in the middle of South Korea’s hugest COVID-19 surge. Ultimately the weekend in question was probably determined by the distributor to be a weak spot in the calendar. Moonfall is already performing anemically in early figures- enough to beat In Our Prime, although Moonfall nearly lost half of its admissions in its second day of availability. The numbers for In Our Prime, by contrast, are holding steady.