Another Profitable Box Office Season Claimed amid Continued Wows for Local Exhibition

The Lunar New Year holiday, one of four main holiday seasons in Korea, is normally a busy time for theaters. Distributors often save their biggest releases for these launch windows, which, often combined with Hollywood tentpoles, crowd the multiplex marquees and kick off a groundswell of theatrical foot traffic.

This year’s five-day holiday weekend (Saturday, January 30 - Wednesday, February 3) also prompted a rise in admissions as cinemas recorded 1.36 million sales. This was a marked increase over last year’s 707,000 sales over its comparable four-day holiday. However, it was a far cry from the 4.95 million tickets sold over the four-day holiday in 2020, just a few weeks before the pandemic began. It seems even more paltry when compared with 2019’s five-day sum of 8.05 million sales.

Covid cases in Korea have been on the rise since late last year, yet in spite of this, there was some cause for optimism following the release of the world’s biggest pandemic hit to date. Spider-Man: No Way Home, the latest big-screen spectacle from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was a monster hit in Korea and managed to replicate the success of prior instalments despite significant Covid-related obstacles. 

Prior to the Lunar New Year holiday, Spidey lorded over the charts for six weeks, a feat not witnessed on Korean box office charts since the smash success of the local period drama Masquerade, released during the Chuseok holidays of 2012. But as Spider-Man wound down his slinging at the top of the charts, so too did the Korean theatrical market take a step back as a whole. 1.83 million tickets were sold during Spider-Man’s opening weekend. That number dropped each of the subsequent five weeks until 524,000 tickets were sold over the last weekend of January. 

Emergency Declaration (2021)

By then, Omicron, the highly transmissible Covid variant that has been wreaking havoc around the world, had well and truly arrived in Korea. Covid cases shot up to record highs, and Korean residents were being advised to exercise caution in the lead-up to the usually busy Lunar New Year holidays.

Though Hollywood generally takes little notice of local holidays around the world, the steady stream of US blockbusters often gives local Lunar New Year titles some kind of foreign competition, yet this year there was nothing on the release calendar, leaving the door wide open to the local industry.

Late last year, the industry appeared to be gearing up for a major holiday at the box office as the country embarked on its ‘Living with Covid’ season with greatly relaxed social distancing restrictions. Showbox was preparing to launch its pricey disaster action-drama Emergency Declaration, with Song Kangho and Lee Byunghun, which had screened at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in the year. Lotte Entertainment soon followed suit by adding its swashbuckling sequel The Pirates: Last Royal Treasure, with Han Hyojoo and Kang Haneul to the holiday fray. There were rumors that other major studios were also getting ready to launch big titles.

Then Omicron hit the headlines, and the picture soon began to change as restrictions were once again added on theaters. Emergency Declaration was pulled off its release date, and other rumored titles never materialized. In their place, Megabox Plus M added the smaller political drama Kingmaker with Sul Kyunggu and Lee Sunkyun to the lineup, delaying it from its original late December release date.

On Wednesday, January 26, The Pirates: Last Royal Treasure and Kingmaker debuted in first and second place at the box office and handily dominated the charts with a combined 81% of all sales. Both titles proceeded to behave like normal holiday tentpoles, growing into the weekend and peaking on Lunar New Year, on Tuesday, February 2. The problem was that in the Omicron-affected market, their debuts were unavoidably much smaller than might otherwise have been expected, consequently adding to relatively small totals after just under two weeks in theaters.

The Pirates: Last Royal Treasure (2021) 

The Pirates kicked off its run with 92,000 sales, while Kingmaker settled for just over half of that with 47,000 seats filled. Their opening weekend (Friday-Sunday) scores reached 327,000 and 174,000 admissions, and by Tuesday, their daily totals had swelled to 137,000 and 78,000 ticket sales.

The Pirates: Last Royal Treasure had a typical 50% second-weekend drop-off to 165,000 entries, while the well-received Kingmaker fared a little better as it tapered off only 37%, as it recorded 109,000 sales. After 12 days in cinemas, the films have brought in 1.09 million and 616,000 spectators.

By contrast, the first instalment of The Pirates debuted in second place in the summer of 2014 (behind all-time chart-topper Roaring Currents) with 273,000 sales on opening day and ultimately went on to welcome 8.67 million viewers.

Along with Lunar New Year, the summer and end-of-year breaks and Chuseok holidays make up the four largest box office seasons for Korean films at the local box office, but even these potent theatrical windows have been greatly curtailed since the onset of the global pandemic. 

The summer holidays, taking place when warmer weather offered better protection to the virus, have fared the best, as they hosted the releases of the biggest Korean hits of 2020 and 2021 - DELIVER US FROM EVIL (4.36 million viewers) and Escape from Mogadishu (3.61 million viewers).

Other seasons have been less fortunate. Pawn was a modest hit during Chuseok in 2020 with 1.72 million viewers, while the end-of-year season was effectively canceled. Two local films were prepared to launch, but one of those (Seobok) ultimately pivoted to a hybrid theatrical and streaming release a few months later, and the other (Life is Beautiful) has yet to find a new release date.

2021’s Lunar New Year didn’t fare much better with the local romantic drama NEW YEAR BLUES topping the season with just 171,000 sales. Following a decent summer season (with accounted for the top three local titles of the year), Chuseok was also able to muster a mid-sized hit with On the Line (1.43 million viewers).

Things once again took a negative turn towards the end of the year, with A YEAR-END MEDLEY, another hybrid streaming and theatrical release, welcoming just 114,000 viewers to cinemas. Given the poor returns for local films during both the end of the year and Lunar New Year seasons, clearly the colder months have been posing greater challenges for exhibitors and distributors during the pandemic.

Kingmaker (2021) 

That said, this year’s Lunar New Year box office returns, though still relatively low, have been far more encouraging than other cold season holidays during the public health crisis, demonstrating an increasing willingness of audiences to venture out to cinemas during the pandemic.

The current theatrical release calendar features no homegrown commercial titles owing to the growing Omicron surge, which has seen the country notch up record daily cases on 11 days during the past fortnight. With cases nearing 40,000 a day and expectations for a significantly higher number in the coming weeks, distributors are unlikely to schedule new major titles until this current wave subsides. But once it does, distributors will have plenty of complete titles waiting in the wings, and hungry audiences may be very eager to return to the multiplexes.