A Japanese cartoon is outselling every Korean film in Korea
Photo: Chiikawa the Movie poster
A Japanese animated film adapted from a comic its author posts on social media held first place at the Korean box office for a second consecutive weekend, outselling every domestic release in the autumn slate.
Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island drew 378,484 admissions between Friday and Sunday and had reached 1,853,136 since its 30 September opening, according to the Korean Film Council's ticketing system as reported by Money Today and News Culture.
It passed 1.5 million on its seventeenth day in Korean cinemas, four days faster than The First Slam Dunk managed, Money Today said. That film is the benchmark for Japanese animation in Korea.
"Chiikawa the Movie" has led the Korean box office for a second weekend running, and it is already the biggest film of the year in Japan.
In Japan the picture is larger again. Released by Toho on 24 July, it took ¥2.24bn from 1.51 million tickets in its opening weekend, passed ¥10bn within thirty days to become the twenty-first Japanese animated feature to do so, and now stands at ¥18.1bn, the highest-grossing film of 2026 in Japan.
The source material is 99 minutes drawn from a strip that Nagano began posting on X in 2020 and that has never had a conventional publishing route. The film adapts a single storyline from it, the Siren Arc.
Distribution across Asia has been thorough. The film opened in Taiwan at the end of July, in Singapore and Malaysia on 20 August with English, Chinese and Malay subtitles, in Vietnam and Indonesia at the end of August, and in Hong Kong and Macao with a Cantonese dub.
Britain is not on the list. No UK release date has been announced and no UK distributor has been named, which leaves a film outselling everything in two of Asia's largest markets with no route to a British cinema.
The domestic competition in Korea is doing well enough on its own terms. Hur Jin-ho's The Assassin(s) reached 3,249,178 admissions by Sunday and is approaching a break-even point of 3.3 million, a figure Money Today said had been lowered by strong foreign pre-sales.
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has taken 12,275,556 admissions in Korea since July and still sat fourth over the weekend, in its thirteenth week.
On Monday, a weekday in its fourth week of release, Chiikawa played 2,911 times across 885 screens and took 26.2 per cent of the day's admissions.
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Chiikawa the Movie has led Korea's box office for a second weekend and is Japan's biggest film of 2026. It has no UK release.