Five Korean films avoided Nolan and ran into each other
Photo: The Assassin(s) Poster Image
Five Korean films opened within eight days of each other around last month's Chuseok holiday, clustered there by distributors avoiding Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which had taken 11.69 million admissions in Korea by the holiday weekend.
Hur Jin-ho's The Assassin(s) took 40.6% of national box-office revenue across the four-day holiday and drew 1.4 million viewers, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported, reaching 1.56 million admissions in total by the Sunday. It passed a million in four days, matching the pace of 12.12: The Day, the Korea Times said. The film reconstructs the 1974 assassination attempt on President Park Chung-hee that killed the first lady, Yuk Young-soo.
They all opened within eight days of each other for Chuseok. One of them took two-fifths of the money.
Behind it the clustering worked less well. Tazza: The Song of Belzebub, the fourth and final film in a series that has opened at every Chuseok since 2006, stood at 660,000 admissions by 27 September, SBS reported, though with a 53% seat occupancy rate despite its adult rating.
Lee Chang-dong's Venice prizewinner Possible Love finished fifth on 115,938 admissions. A Korean remake of The Intern, which had opened a week earlier, and Hur's film were the only two to find a wide audience.
Chuseok and Lunar New Year are the two windows Korean distributors build their year around, and the holiday has not recovered its pre-pandemic shape. The three-day version drew around four million admissions before 2020 and 950,000 in 2021.
By 2024 it had climbed back to 2.8 million, IBTimes Korea reported, but a single title, I, the Executioner, accounted for 2.35 million of those tickets.
This year's pattern is the same shape with more films in it. One release takes the holiday, the others divide what is left, and the strategy of moving everything into the window produces a winner rather than a bigger audience.
The Odyssey, meanwhile, was still in third place during the holiday it had been avoided over, in its seventh week in Korean cinemas.
Asked whether The Assassin(s) could hold its position once the holiday ended, the Korea Times noted that Chuseok hits do not always carry their momentum into the following weekend.
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Five Korean films opened around Chuseok to avoid The Odyssey. The Assassin(s) took 40.6% of the money and the rest divided what was left.