Korea box office admissions down 1.6% in 2024 as local titles dominate

South Korea’s field workplace admissions dipped 1.6% in 2024 whereas native productions recorded a major rise in market share throughout the 12 months.

There have been 123 million admissions in 2024, in accordance with Kobis, the Korean Movie Council’s field workplace monitoring service. That is down on the 125.1 million admissions recorded in 2023, which had marked an 11% rise on 2022 because the nation continued to draw cinemagoers again to theatres after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Scroll down for prime 10 of 2024

The newest figures spotlight that admissions stay 45.6% beneath pre-pandemic 2019, which had ranked as South Korea’s all-time highest field workplace 12 months when it comes to admissions and gross.

Whole field workplace takings in 2024 was $812.3m, a 5.6% drop year-on-year.

Success got here within the type of native options, which claimed 58% of the annual market share – a major rise from 48.6% in 2023. Seven of the highest ten movies on the field workplace this 12 months have been South Korean productions, spearheaded by Jang Jae-hyun’s supernatural thriller Exhuma and the motion blockbuster The Roundup: Punishment. There have been additionally some native surprising successes together with Pilot and Firefighters, which managed to draw audiences by way of robust word-of-mouth regardless of challenges.

US productions claimed a 32% market share was taken by US productions, trailed by Japan with 5%. In 2023, US movies accounted for 35% of the market whereas Japanese options took 14.1%.

Sequels and remakes featured prominently at 2024’s Korean field workplace, together with Veteran sequel I, The Executioner and the fourth instalment of The Roundup collection starring Don Lee. Because the lingering results of Covid-19 are very a lot nonetheless palpable inside the trade, this reliance on established franchises appears to sign a cautious method by traders looking for safer, confirmed materials over riskier, unique tales.

One other notable pattern seems to be a fading distinction between peak and off-peak seasons. Historically, the summer time months have been the primetime for tentpole releases in Korea, as seen final 12 months with field workplace hits Smugglers and Concrete Utopia, each launched in July. In distinction, 2024 bucked this pattern, with Exhuma and The Roundup: Punishment choosing April debuts.

Regardless of their low season releases, each movies managed to surpass the ten million admission milestone, a crucial benchmark for fulfillment within the Korean movie market. This shift away from seasonal field workplace patterns could mirror altering viewers preferences, with viewers prioritising high quality content material over launch timing.

Wanting forward, there’s mounting concern over the shortage of funding within the home movie trade. Over the previous 12 months, many manufacturing corporations depleted their stockpile of “storage movies”, which have been held again as a result of pandemic, doubtlessly leaving a void within the launch pipeline for 2025 and past.

The Busan Movie Council additionally reported a pointy decline in its help for movies in 2024, throughout which it backed simply 74 initiatives (17 of which have been options). This can be a 37% drop from the earlier 12 months’s 118 movies, and the bottom determine since 2012.

Including to the turbulence, main South Korean leisure agency CJ ENM is present process its second consecutive 12 months of restructuring inside its movie division, additional underscoring volatility and the wrestle for movies to carry out on the field workplace at a time when streaming platforms have gotten ever extra fashionable. In accordance with a survey from the Korea Artistic Content material Company (Kocca), 89.3% of individuals mentioned that they had used a streaming platform inside the previous 12 months.

In the meantime, latest political disruption and the airplane crash at Muan airport have positioned short-term halts on movie releases and promotions.

South Korea field workplace 2024