Actor Ha Jung-woo has once again had his pride hurt. The movie ‘Broken’ that he starred in received unprecedented harsh reviews and was a box office flop. It seems that his title of ‘box actor’ has been damaged due to the consecutive box office slumps of his recent leading roles.

‘Broken’, which tells the story of a man investigating the truth behind his younger brother‘s death, opened on the 5th with high expectations due to the collaboration between Ha Jung-woo and Kim Nam-gil, but it has been struggling without making a proper splash. Although it started off at number one on the first day, it was immediately overtaken in the rankings by ‘Hitman 2’ and ‘Secret That Cannot Be Told’, which were released one or two weeks earlier. It is barely maintaining third place, but it is only able to attract about 30,000 viewers even on the weekend. As of the 9th, the cumulative number of viewers is only 160,000, so it is virtually impossible to break even (1.1 million).

The audience response is even worse. From the first day of release, the CJ CGV actual viewing rating Golden Egg Index has shown an unprecedented decline in the 50% range. It barely recovered to 69%, but it is not only the lowest rating among current releases, but also the worst rating among recently released Korean films. Watchapedia, a movie rating platform, and Naver audience ratings are also receiving disappointing scores of 2 points (out of 5) and 5.8 points (out of 10), respectively.

The audience pointed out the characters’ difficult-to-understand actions and lack of plausibility as the film‘s shortcomings. In particular, amidst audience complaints about the lack of explanation of the secret surrounding the novel that predicted the death of the protagonist Min-tae’s (Ha Jung-woo) younger brother and the intentions of the novelist Horyeong (Kim Nam-gil) who wrote the novel, Ha Jung-woo had previously explained the setting, saying, “The original script had solid explanations, but a lot of it was edited out during post-production.”

Ha Jung-woo has been suffering from painful box office slumps in his recently released leading roles, coupled with the unprecedented negative reviews and failure of ‘Broken’. All of Ha Jung-woo‘s leading roles since ‘Ashfall’ in 2018 have failed to break even, including ‘Closet’ (cumulative audience: 1.26 million/break-even point: 2.15 million), ‘Unofficial Operation’ (1.05 million/5 million), ‘1947 Boston’ (1.02 million/4.2 million), and ‘Hijacking’ (1.77 million/2.3 million).

Therefore, the box office success of Ha Jung-woo’s other film, ‘Lobby’, scheduled to be released this year, has become even more important. ‘Lobby’, in particular, is drawing attention as it is Ha Jung-woo‘s third film that he has directed after ‘Roller Coaster’ and ‘Heo Sam-gwan’. ‘Lobby’ is a comedy about a researcher who is far from golf and plays lobby golf to win a national business license.


Reporter Seungmi Lee smlee@donga.com

This article is automatically translated using Google AI. If you notice any inaccuracies, please let us know at allkstar@donga.com.