‘New Renaissance’ for Korean movie industry

This year was a record-breaking year for the Korean film industry.

On Dec 1st, Box office numbers for 2013 show that the audience for Korean movie reached 115,473,993 moviegoers (60 percent of the market share) this year, exceeded last year's 114,613,190.

The numbers are the highest in the history of the Korean film industry and for the first time in history, Korean movies managed to exceed 100 million viewers for the second consecutive year.

After a long tunnel of slump, Korean movies this year successfully appealed to many movie viewers since last year. “The movie industry saw a minus rate on investment earnings from 2007 until 2011. But in 2012 ,the record was broken and it saw an increasing earnings surprise in 2013,” the report said.

Driving the Korean movie boom were blockbusters like “Miracle in Cell No. 7”,“The Thieves” and “Masquerade,” which garnered over 10 million viewers each.

Easy access to theaters is a major reason attributed to the increased audience numbers, critics say.

“In the past, people just visited theaters to see movies. Now they go there when they’re shopping or dining. Theaters absorb people more easily as they draw closer to people’s lives,”

Last year Korean movie attracted audiences in 30's and 40's and it expanded to audiences in 50's as well this year. Now Korean film admissions led by audiences over 30. This extended movie audiences age group is another good sign for korean movie industries.

However, despite of wide range of development, the ‘darkness’ of Korean movie industry still existed. Still the most of the movies that made a box office hit were made by huge distributors like CJ, Lotte, or Showbox. While for an independent films or art films that were filmed with a low budget were like getting a blood from a stone to procuring the screen in the theater. As a result, these films were played like once in a day, while "Pieta" also had a failure in the domestic cinemas, only having a 0.6 million viewers. Compared to the "Masquerade" and "The Thieves", which were screened over 20 times a day, major distributors are blocking the development of these small industries, while violating audience’s right to watch. Of course, major distributor’s huge investment and marketing are one of the factors of Korean movie Renaissance. However, in order to develop continually, there should be a way to develop fairly.