'Wangsa-nam' Tops 150B Won Box-Office…Showbox Records 176.3B Won Revenue in Q1 'No. 1 Distributor'

Distributor Showbox chalked up the top spot in domestic distributor revenue in the first quarter this year, riding on the back-to-back box-office surges of director Jang Hang-jun's films 'The Man Who Lives With a King' and 'If Our Love Were Real'.

According to materials released by the Korean Film Council on the 29th titled 'Korean Film Industry Review for Q1 2026,' Showbox's revenue for the first quarter (January to March) came to 176.3B Won. That accounts for a commanding 55.4% share of total distributor revenue. Meanwhile, Walt Disney Company Korea, which rolled out 'Avatar: Fire and Ash', 'Zootopia 2' and more, remained in second place with revenue of 43.1B Won (13.6% share).

In particular, 'The Man Who Lives With a King' generated 151.8B Won in revenue as a single title to take first place in box office for the entire first quarter, injecting energy into the theater scene that had been stuck in a slump. Thanks to this film's success, Korea's film revenue market share in the first quarter rose by 19.9 percentage points year-on-year to reach 73.4%.

In the first quarter of this year, total revenue for Korean films amounted to 233.3B Won, with cumulative admissions of 24.01 million. Compared with the same period last year, revenue surged 117.5% and admissions jumped 115.1%. Even compared with the first-quarter averages from 2017 to 2019 before the COVID-19 crisis, revenue recovered to 94.5% and admissions to 79.7%, marking encouraging indicators.

On the other hand, the position of foreign films is shrinking. In the first quarter of this year, foreign films brought in 84.7B Won in revenue and drew 7.89 million admissions, falling 9.0% and 18.3%, respectively, year-on-year. As a result, they have been unable to escape a continued decline for the third consecutive year.