Despite the mixed joys and sorrows, the status of K-content was solid. K-movies, which were hit the hardest since the COVID-19 incident, held out hope by producing two 10 million-viewer films this year, and K-dramas, which achieved globalization through global OTT, succeeded in solidifying their position more firmly with ‘K-romantic comedy’ as their weapon. K-pop has expanded its influence beyond Asia, North America, and now even to Europe and South America, solidifying its position as a ‘genre’. Here‘s a look at the K-content that received love from people all over the world this year, categorized into movies, TV dramas, and K-pop.

If I had to summarize the trend of Korean movies this year in one word, it would be ‘hyper-polarization’.

Although ‘The Outlaws’ and ‘The Outlaws 4’ achieved the feat of attracting more than 10 million viewers, highly anticipated movies failed one after another, showing a stark polarization phenomenon where they were either ‘blockbusters’ or ‘failures’.

Despite the extremely poor box office performance odds across the industry, domestically produced animations such as ‘Hatchuping of Love’, live performance films, and documentaries have shown a new way out of the crisis by succeeding in ‘fruit box office hits’.

The films ‘The Grave’ and ‘The Outlaws 4’ ranked 1st and 2nd respectively in the box office rankings, recording cumulative audiences of 11.91 million and 11.5 million. The two films attracted attention in that they were released in February and April respectively, avoiding the ‘traditional theater peak season’, such as during school vacations and holidays. The occult horror film ‘The Grave’ broke the limitations of the unpopular genre, and ‘The Outlaws 4’ broke the concerns about the cliche of the series.

Despite the meaningful achievement of producing two films that reached 10 million viewers, the overall atmosphere of Korean films this year was dark. Among the 461 Korean feature-length commercial films (excluding independent and art films) released from January to November, the only films that broke even were ‘The Grave’ and ‘The Outlaws 4’, as well as ‘Pilot’, ‘The Escape’, ‘Handsome Guys’, and ‘Picnic’.

Highly anticipated films starring top actors such as ‘Wonderland’ (620,000 viewers) starring Tang Wei, Suzy, and Park Bo-gum, ‘The Architect’ (520,000 viewers), and ‘Escape: Project Silence’ (680,000 viewers) starring Lee Sun-kyun and Joo Ji-hoon failed to do well at the box office one after another.

Amid the poor box office performances of highly anticipated commercial films, The success of ‘small films’, which were considered ‘non-mainstream’, was a source of comfort for Chungmuro. The documentary ‘National Foundation War’, which deals with President Syngman Rhee, attracted 1.17 million viewers, more than 9 times the break-even point (120,000 viewers), and the children’s animation ‘Love‘s Hatchuping’, broke the record of 1 million viewers for the first time in 12 years as a domestically produced animation.

On the other hand, ‘Im Young-woong│I’m Hero the Stadium’, which features Lim Young-woong‘s live concert, attracted 350,000 viewers to theaters, beating BTS’s ‘Love Yourself in Seoul’ (340,000 viewers) to set the record for the highest-grossing true-life concert film of all time.


Reporter Seungmi Lee smlee@donga.com