Local film weekly Movieweek is going out of business this month, leaving Cine21 as the last Korean movie weekly standing.

The magazine announced the news through their official Twitter account on March 12.

“Our upcoming 571st edition, which will be out on March 22, will be our last issue,” the weekly said via Twitter.

The film magazine was founded in 2001, and has been considered one of the two most influential movie weeklies for the last 12 years, along with Cine21. 

From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, a number of movie weeklies were founded. Movieweek was one of them, along with Film 2.0 and Premiere.

In 2008, Premiere and Film 2.0 stopped publishing, leaving Movieweek and Cine21 as the last local film weeklies.

One of the major reasons behind their disappearance was the emergence of free entertainment papers and magazines in the late 2000s.

Movieweek in fact is turning into a free entertainment magazine “magazine M” next month ― a publication jointly founded by major local daily Joongang Ilbo and its subsidiary Megabox ― a large chain of movie theaters here.

Movieweek was incorporated into Joongang Entertainment and Sports Publishing Inc., another subsidiary of the Joongang Ilbo, in 2007.

“We are not sure how magazine M will be different from Movieweek in terms of content,” Movieweek writer Baek Jong-hyeon told The Korea Herald. “We’ll have to wait till next month to find that out.”

A number of popular figures in the film industry have expressed their regret at the news, including film director-producer Kim Jho Gwang-soo, actress Kim Hye-na, and screenwriter Kim Do-hoon.

Among them, film producer Shim Jae-myung, whose works include last year’s hit “Architecture 101” and Park Chan-wook’s 2000 drama “Joint Security Area,” said she was “saddened” by the news.

“This shows the dark side of today’s local film industry where the market share of homegrown films are rising to nearly 80 percent,” she said via her Twitter account on March 13.

“The role of film criticism is being ignored and film journals are losing their ground. This is the era that only praises films that are box office hits.”

By Claire Lee (dyc@heraldcorp.com)