AVATAR in Korea

In case you were wondering, James Cameron's 3D blockbuster AVATAR currently sits on top of the advance ticket sales, accounting for 71.2 percent of all sales (KOBIS, of course). Not bad -- although it does not come close to the 89.7 percent that TRANSFORMERS 2 got.

It is also playing at five IMAX theaters around the country -- in Seoul at the CGV Wangsimni and Yongsan, and in Daegu at the CGV Daegu, Gwangju at the CGV Gwangju, and in Ilsan at the CGV Ilsan.

It is hard to believe I was in Korea way back when TITANIC came out. Hard to believe that at the time it was the biggest movie ever in Korea, with something like 4.5 million admissions (SHIRI was still a year away). I watched TITANIC in what was then the only multiplex in Daejeon, The Academy (I think it was called). It was a decent theater, with three screens, located near the train station. Today, that theater is part of the Megaline franchise, and has been divided into nine tiny screens (assuming it is still there).

It really gives you sense of how much the Korean movie industry has changed over the past decade -- from almost no multiplexes to almost nothing but multiplexes, from low attendance to high (national attendance to films has tripled in Korea since TITANIC). And, of course, the most popular films in Korea are now all Korean. The biggest foreign film ever in Korea, TRANSFORMERS 2, would not even make it onto the top-10 overall there.

Oh, and there is an article on 3D movies in Korea (although not a lot of information about the local scene) here.