Discover more from These Days in South Korean Film
June saw an apparent recovery for the badly weakened South Korean film market with the first post-COVID ten million viewer mark breaking film. If you don’t know the significance of this, ten million viewers is the traditional point at which a South Korean film is considered a blockbuster. It’s easy enough to see why- in a country of fifty million people, any movie that gets this many viewers must be a pretty decisive pop culture success.
The Roundup, a cop film that’s the sequel to The Outlaws from 2017, is the film so honored. To date The Roundup has earned over twelve million admissions, and single-handedly turned the domestic film industry around at the South Korean box office. After big returns for Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, with over seven million for the former and five million for the latter, the unavoidable conclusion seemed to be that some movie, chiefly foreign ones, were the only ones that could weather the new market.
And that’s still true. Unfortunately. The big influence that drove me to specialize in the South Korean film industry in the first place wasn’t the major blockbusters, but the lesser known movies, which were often competitive even if they only had a few million viewers to their name. Those lesser known movies haven’t rebounded. Neither Broker nor Decision to Leave could take advantage of Cannes Film Festival to anywhere near the extent that Parasite did on its way to the ten million viewer club.
Even The Witch : Part 2. The Other One (I really hate this title) is only looking to just barely clear the bar set by its pre-pandemic prequel. The dent made by that action film in the current grosses has also already been mostly negated by Top Gun: Maverick, which is doing very well at the South Korean box office despite its delayed release. The South Korean film market as it exists right now is one overly defined by brand names. Even original content from established directors can’t do much against these high-profile sequels.
As usual, the local popularity of the brand name has a lot to do with success. Lightyear did incredibly poorly in South Korea just because Toy Story isn’t that significantly regarded as important there. But specific examples like that notwithstanding, there are far more similarities between the South Korean and American film markets now compared to when I first started working in the field. Given that, I can’t exactly be surprised that there just isn’t that much interest in these titles anymore. Even Hansan: Rising Dragon, the big flick of late July, is being framed as a prequel of the all-time South Korean box office leader The Admiral: Roaring Currents- a far cry from the original cultural context of that movie, where of the three major summer releases in 2014, it actually had the least pre-release hype.