By Mark Schilling
How big is the Korean pop culture boom in Japan? The Korean TV soap Winter Sonata
has a large, fanatical following and its star Bae Yong Jun has achieved a Beatle-esque
popularity (It helps that he looks something like a Fab Four era John Lennon).
Also, what used to be a trickle of Korean movies in Tokyo theatres has become, if not a
flood, a strong, steady stream, fed from various sources. Among the Korean films
currently on release at The Uninvited (distributor: Toshiba Entertainment), The Scandal
(Cine Quanon), Poison (SPO), Memories of Murder (Cine Quanon) and Silmido (Toei).
Where once only a few boutique distributors, such a Cine Quanon, imported films from
Japan's neighbor to the north, larger players are now getting into the game.
The largest so far is Toei, which released the Kang Woo-seok thriller Silmido -- a
record-smashing blockbuster in Korea -- on June 5 on 190 screens. By June 9, after five
days in the theatres, the film had earned Y130 million ($1.2 million) and Toei now
expects it to reach the Y600 million ($5.5 million) mark -- a mediocre showing given its
reported $3 million minimum guarantee. "It's based on a history incident and the
Japanese audience is not as familiar with the story," opined a Toei number cruncher.
By comparison, the film that ignited the Korean boom -- the Kang Je-gyu spy thriller
Shiri -- grossed Y1.85 billion ($17.0 million) at the Japanese box office in 2000, an
all-time high for a Korean film. Also, another Korean thriller, Park Chang Wook's Joint
Security Area (JSA), earned Y1.16 billion ($10.6 million) in 2001. None of the dozens of
Koreans film released since have approached these marks.
One still has a chance -- Kang Je-gyu's Korean war epic Taegukgi, which UIP will
release on 350 screens on June 26. Comparisons with Saving Private Ryan -- a film that
grossed Y2.4 billion ($22 million) in Japan -- are already in the air.
