NOTES ON ENTERTAINMENT, CULTURE AND MORE FROM KOREA (OR WHEREVER)

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Korea Weekend Box Office - Feb. 13-15

Benjamin Button might be curious, but Korea's cow movie OLD PARTNER is still the biggest news in the local movie scene.

A month after being released, OLD PARTNER (Wonang Sori) had its best weekend yet, pulling in another 1.8 billion won ($1.3 million) from 270,000 admissions. The ultra-low budget documentary has now made $3.4 million. In fact, President Lee Myung-bak went to see the movie a few days ago, giving the movie a nice little bit of publicity (in fact, with that act alone Lee Myung-bak probably did more for the film industry than five years of Roh Moo-hyun).

The top film last weekend was BENJAMIN BUTTON, making 3.05 billion won (about $2.17 million) since its release on Feb. 12.

Very close behind in No. 2 was the South Korean film THE SCAM (Jakjeon), with 2.98 billion won ($2.13 million).

At No. 5 was MARINE BOY. The big action film is probably one week away from being surpassed by OLD PARTNER, despite having a budget roughly 50 times bigger. Yeah, that's schadenfreude I'm feeling, too.

(If Marine Boy, Modern Boy and Oldboy got into a fight, who would win?).


Btw, Korean movies are now up to 46.5 percent of the box office for the year. Things seem to be getting better, at least at the moment.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

one of the actors in Marine Boy, said he hopes the recent trend of audience swarming to movies without big stars, happens to their movie too. such irony!

ed