How to read a Korean box office chart

Almost every country reports box office in currency. Korea reports it in 관객수 — admissions, the number of tickets sold. Revenue figures exist and are published, but the number quoted in headlines, in conversation and on posters is the count of human beings who bought a seat.

This is a better measure than it might sound. Ticket prices vary by time of day, by format and by discount scheme, so a revenue figure conflates how many people watched a film with how many of them paid a 4DX surcharge at 8pm on a Saturday. Admissions do not.

It also makes films comparable across decades in a way revenue never is, since no inflation adjustment is required.

A film that sells ten million admissions in Korea is called a 천만 영화 — a 'ten-million film' — and it is the benchmark that defines a domestic blockbuster. In a country of roughly fifty million people it means something close to one ticket for every five residents.

Only a couple of dozen films have ever managed it. Watching a release climb towards it is a genuine national spectator sport, and the daily admissions figure is followed the way a sports score is.

This is why the cumulative column matters more than the daily one. A film's total since release is the number that decides whether it is remembered.

Alongside admissions, the data carries the number of screens a film played on and the number of individual showings. Those two columns explain most of what looks anomalous in a chart.

A film on two thousand screens and one on forty are not competing on equal terms, and the gap between their admissions says more about booking power than about either film. Korea's exhibition market is concentrated in three chains, and a title without their backing has a hard ceiling regardless of quality.

Dividing admissions by showings gives you the average number of people in the room, which is a rough but honest measure of how much an audience actually wanted to be there.

Korean film policy formally recognises a category called 다양성영화 — 'diversity film' — covering independent, art-house and documentary releases. It is an official designation, not a marketing term, and the box office data can be filtered by it.

The reason it gets a separate chart is arithmetic: a documentary that does exceptionally well on thirty screens will never appear in a combined top ten dominated by wide releases. On its own chart it is legible.

For a visitor, this filter is the quickest route to the part of Korean cinema that reaches film festivals abroad but rarely a multiplex. It is also, unfortunately, the part least likely to carry English subtitles at a regular screening.

Korean box office data is not an estimate produced by an analytics firm. Cinemas report ticket sales to a national settlement network — 영화관입장권통합전산망, usually shortened to KOBIS — run by the Korean Film Council, and the published chart is that settlement data.

That is why the figures are exact rather than rounded, and why they can be broken down by region, by nationality of production and by whether a film is classed as a diversity release.

A day's admissions are settled overnight and published the following morning, so the newest chart available is always yesterday's. Weekly charts appear only once the whole week has been settled.