[HanCinema's News] Domestic Box Office Halved Compared to Previous Weekend

On July 27th the Korean Film Council released the final figures for the weekend defined from July 24th to July 26th. During that time 761,077 viewers came out to the cineplexes. This is down nearly half relative to the previous week, July 17th to July 19th, when admissions totaled 1,325,766 persons.

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There is no giant mystery as to how this happened. The overall box office figures coincide neatly with those of the recent zombie "Peninsula" which faced a similar hard drop in its second weekend. "Peninsula" held 80.8% of the screens and 78.2% of the viewers in South Korea, as the weekend held no major new releases. Consequently, "Peninsula" managed a cumulative total of 2,862,895 viewers following its second weekend.

While it's tempting to blame the laggard performance on COVID-19 scaring people away from the movie theaters past box office trends show similar outcomes when a movie is ambivalently received by South Korean audiences. It is conceivable, however, that second run audiences are more picky in a pandemic than they were prior to the COVID-19 epidemic. This week, "Steel Rain 2: Summit" will offer another test as to what extent the South Korean film industry has truly recovered.

Written by William Schwartz