An Irregular Film Update - 3/22/2023

Slam Dunk, Suzume, and Swordsmith Village

I haven’t done one of these posts in awhile. As much as I could cite personal reasons for this, in all honesty it’s difficult even for a specialist like me to generate much enthusiasm for South Korean films lately, and the topic of this post goes a long way to explaining why. If you’re not familiar with Slam Dunk, Suzume, or Swordsmith Village, all three are Japanese anime films. They are also, at present, the only films anyone seems to be watching at the South Korean box office.

The situation is an odd one, but to sum it up in brief, since COVID-19 the main movies to do well in South Korea are the ones with existing popular brand names. In general, this tends to benefit Hollywood films, but lately most Hollywood films are arcane brands hardly anyone knows about outside of the United States. Avatar: The Way of Water did well in South Korea like it did everywhere else, but something like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania can only appeal to diehard Marvel fans at best and Shazam! Fury of the Gods has done so laughably poorly in South Korea it’s been outperformed by art house movies.

Slam Dunk, by contrast, was a tremendously popular sports manga and anime in the nineties in South Korea, and elsewhere. But for The First Slam Dunk to have earned four million admissions since the beginning of the year, and still be second place on the overall box office, remains remarkable less for Slam Dunk itself as it does to the apparent complete lack of competition from either Hollywood or the domestic South Korean market. Which isn’t to say that the story of Slam Dunk isn’t remarkable. The story had comparable popularity to Dragon Ball worldwide when it was still new. But the significance of sports comics is frustratingly ignored in most discussions of comics history which center around fantastic genres as being the only artistically significant ones. On that note I recently wrote an article in the Comics Journal about Alien Baseball Team, an important South Korean comic of the eighties, with similar cultural appreciation issues out of step with its actual popularity.

But it’s not like a brand has to be thirty years old to do well at the South Korean box office. Director Makoto Shinkai of Your Name and Weathering With You is a brand name in his own right, and it’s no surprise that Suzume has zoomed past the two million viewer mark in South Korea. The main surprise in anime film in South Korea news is that the new Demon Slayer movie, Swordsmith Village, is pulling in relatively weak numbers- only five hundred thousand as of this writing, when the previous Demon Slayer film Mugen Train started this whole trend by pulling in over two million viewers over several months back in 2021.

Ironically, Swordsmith Village is probably being stymied by the South Korean box office already being dominated by too much other anime, putting local distributors in an awkward position. And of course, all of this paints a pretty bleak picture for South Korean film. There aren’t even any big summer releases with confirmed dates right now. The problem is pretty clearly not that people are unwilling to come back to movie theaters- just that no one in South Korean film production is doing a very good job of coming up with a reason why they should.