After the record-breaker, 'Project Hail Mary' looks to keep Korean theaters full

"The King's Warden" has taken the Korean box office by storm for two months straight. The period drama is now the highest-grossing film in Korean box office history at 142.5 billion won ($95 million), racking up 14.75 million ticket sales to date.

But seven weeks into its run, the film's dominance is winding down, and the race is on to see which one fills the gap.

The strongest candidate by far is "Project Hail Mary." The sci-fi adventure from Amazon MGM Studios opened on March 20 and drew 430,000 admissions over its first weekend, landing at No. 2 behind "The King's Warden" with roughly 561,000 tickets sold through Sunday.

That gave it the best opening weekend for a foreign film in Korea this year, beating out "F1: The Movie" (2025), which started with about 347,000 admissions before reaching a final tally of 5.2 million tickets. It also outpaced the Korean debuts of two earlier Ryan Gosling films: "La La Land" (2016), which opened to 427,000, and "First Man" (2018), to 350,000.

Advance ticket sales suggest the film has more room to run. As of Sunday morning, it accounted for 34.3 percent of all advance tickets sold nationwide, ahead of "The King's Warden" at 24.5 percent.

Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the film is adapted from Andy Weir's 2021 novel of the same name. Gosling plays a middle-school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of how he got there, and gradually pieces together that he has been sent on a last-resort mission to save Earth from an extinction-level threat.

The film's global numbers back up the local buzz. It took in $141 million in its opening weekend, including $80.6 million from North America and $60.4 million from 82 international markets. That makes it the largest debut ever for Amazon MGM and the biggest worldwide opening of 2026 to date.

The picture has been less rosy for another major foreign title in the same window. Pixar's "Hoppers," a sci-fi comedy about a college student who transfers her mind into a robotic beaver, has largely fizzled in Korea despite pulling in $243 million worldwide and topping the North American box office for two straight weekends since its March 6 release.

The film has drawn just 650,283 admissions as of Tuesday, squeezed out by the dominance of "The King's Warden." Some local viewers also found elements of the film too dark and grotesque for children, and it didn't help that its early-March opening collided with the start of the school year here, likely thinning out the family audience.

Theater operators are treating the arrival of "Project Hail Mary" as good news. The stretch from March through May is typically one of the quieter periods on the Korean box office calendar, with fewer major titles to draw crowds. Having a second strong film right alongside "The King's Warden" should help sustain the momentum that the period drama kicked off, industry watchers say.