Seollal movie attendance rebounds but still falls short of pre-COVID highs

Lunar New Year has long been one of the Korean film industry's most reliable cash grabs, a stretch of days when families flood multiplexes and distributors place their biggest bets.

That formula held strong for years, then came apart during the pandemic, and has been slow to reassemble ever since. This year's holiday was a step forward, measured against a low bar still.

Korean theaters drew 3.23 million admissions across the four-day Lunar New Year stretch from Feb. 14 to 17 — a marked recovery from recent years, but well short of the volume the same window generated at its pre-pandemic peak, according to the Korean Film Council's box office tracker.

In 2019, the equivalent holiday period averaged between 1.35 and 1.41 million daily admissions. This year's four-day total works out to a daily average of roughly 808,000, less than two-thirds of what a typical holiday day looked like before COVID-19.

Most of this year's improvement traces back to a single film, "The King's Warden." The period drama opened Feb. 4 and has held the top spot ever since, accounting for the lion's share of the holiday's momentum with daily admissions growing steadily throughout: 357,000 on Saturday, then 537,000 on each of the following two days, then a 661,000 spike on Lunar New Year's Day itself.

Cumulative admissions stand at 3.52 million as of Wednesday, making it the first film of 2026 to clear that threshold.

The film also drew a notable viewer on Lunar New Year's Day. On Tuesday, President Lee Jae Myung posted cryptically on social media that he was headed to the movies, withholding the title. Officials later confirmed he had watched "The King's Warden" at a CGV multiplex in Yongsan.

Directed by Jang Hang-jun, known as much for his TV talk-show presence as his filmmaking, the film stars former K-pop idol Park Ji-hoon and character actor Yoo Hae-jin as an exiled boy king and the village chief tasked with watching over him, respectively.

It crossed its reported break-even threshold of 2.6 million admissions on Monday, its 13th day in release. Viewers have given it a 3.3 out of 5 on Watchapedia, Korea's equivalent of Rotten Tomatoes.

The same cannot be said for its competition. Box office stalwart Ryoo Seung-wan's "Humint" — a spy thriller starring Zo In-sung, Park Jung-min and Shin Se-kyung — drew 795,000 admissions across the four days, crossing 1 million cumulative on Lunar New Year's Day, its seventh day out.

That is a respectable milestone in isolation, but a deflating return for the holiday window's most heavily anticipated title, which carried a 23.5 billion won ($16 million) budget. Viewers have rated it 2.8 out of 5 on Watchapedia.

"Number One," another film timed for the Lunar New Year holiday reuniting "Parasite" stars Choi Woo-shik and Jang Hye-jin, fared worst of the three major releases, drawing just 161,000 cumulative admissions through Tuesday.

The family melodrama finished even behind "Choir of God," a faith-based drama that opened on New Year's Eve and has quietly accumulated 1.26 million admissions since.

Year-over-year, the improvement is palpable. The equivalent four-day window in 2025 drew approximately 2.04 million total admissions, with "Hitman 2" and "Black Nuns" splitting the holiday. In 2024, no meaningful domestic competition materialized at all, leaving Timothee Chalamet's "Wonka" to lead largely uninspired charts.

But against pre-pandemic levels, it represents how far the industry still has to go. With investment drying up and audiences increasingly staying home to stream, Korean cinema has gone without a 10-million-admission blockbuster since 2019, and "The King's Warden," at 3.52 million and counting, is unlikely to get there.

In a telling sign of how much the ground has shifted, the domestic release slate has shrunk from 40 titles in 2023 to 22 penciled in for 2026.