The period drama is closing in on a milestone that serves as the Korean film industry's definitive marker of a megahit, one that no film managed to reach in all of 2025
When "The King's Warden" opened on Feb. 4, a full week ahead of the Lunar New Year window, many in the industry read the timing as a kind of concession.
Ryoo Seung-wan's 23.5 billion won ($16 million) spy thriller "Humint," due a week later, was positioned as the season's main event; opening early looked like a move to grab whatever audience was available before the bigger film landed.
Four weeks on, "The King's Warden" has drawn 8.48 million admissions, becoming one of Korean cinema's unlikeliest success stories in recent years. "Humint," meanwhile, sits at 1.7 million.
Directed by Jang Hang-jun and starring Yoo Hae-jin as a village chief who takes in the young King Danjong (Park Ji-hoon) after his uncle strips him of the throne, the film held the No. 1 spot in the box office for 18 straight days.
On Sunday, a national holiday, the film drew over 810,000 viewers in a single day, eclipsing its own record of 660,000 set on Lunar New Year's day. Cumulative admissions stood at 8.48 million as of Monday morning, according to the Korean Film Council's box office tracker.
At this rate, 10 million admissions seem to be a matter of when, not if. If it does get there, it would be the first film to do so since "The Roundup: Punishment," the fourth installment of Ma Dong-seok's crowd-pleasing crime franchise, hit 11.5 million in 2024.
Ten million admissions is to the Korean box office what $1 billion in worldwide gross is to Hollywood: the line that separates a hit from a phenomenon, an entire country's moviegoing taste compressed into a single number.
To date, 33 films have joined the club: 24 Korean, nine Hollywood. The list includes Oscar winner Bong Joon-ho's "The Host" (13 million, 2006) and "Parasite" (10.3 million, 2019), zombie blockbuster turned global sensation "Train to Busan" (11.6 million, 2016), and Hollywood juggernauts like the "Avengers" series, "Frozen" and "Avatar," to name a handful.
The year of 2019 was the high-water mark, with a record five films reaching the milestone in a single year. That was before the COVID-19 pandemic struck and hollowed out the multiplexes the following year.
No film reached 10 million tickets in 2020 or 2021, and with Korea's box office notably slow to recover to pre-pandemic levels, only two films per year cleared that bar from 2022 through 2024.
In 2025, not a single film got there, the starkest sign yet of an industry struggling to bring audiences back.
For a market that has spent the post-pandemic years watching its benchmarks erode, hopes are high that "The King's Warden" breaking that threshold might signal a genuine turning point.
The figure itself speaks to something worth unpacking for audiences overseas: why does Korea measure box office performance by ticket count rather than revenue?
It's a distinction that makes the country's system something of an outlier. Most major markets, including the US and UK, report box office performance in terms of gross -- the total amount of money a film has earned in theaters.
One reason Korea can count this way is that it has a centralized, legally mandated system purpose-built for it. By law, every multiplex must electronically submit sales data to the state-run Korean Film Council, which publishes the aggregates daily through a public online tracker.
No such requirement exists in the US or UK, where box office figures are mainly compiled by private firms working from studio-reported estimates.
Counting by admissions has its advantages. Revenue doesn't adjust for inflation over time, meaning studios can claim record-breaking grosses even when they're driven more by rising ticket prices than actual demand.
Ticket counts strip away that noise and may offer a cleaner apples-to-apples comparison of actual popularity.
But the tally alone is becoming an increasingly partial measure of a film's commercial success, as revenue streams have diversified well beyond the multiplexes.
A case in point: Park Chan-wook's "No Other Choice," released last September with a 17 billion won price tag, would have needed 4 to 5 million admissions to break even on ticket sales alone. Instead, distributor CJ ENM recouped the full budget by pre-selling rights to over 200 countries before the film even opened domestically.
"No Other Choice" went on to sell 2.9 million tickets here.
moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com
