What an amazing weekend for TRANSFORMERS. Its first weekend was fairly impressive, but its second weekend was one of the strongest follow-ups ever in Korea. Certainly the strongest second week for a foreign film. In its second weekend, TRANSFORMERS scored 1.49 million admissions nationwide, which was almost the same as the previous weekend. It might have even been stronger. When was the last time a blockbuster improved on its attendance in the second week? Right, never. Those big Hollywood films usually plunge, down 40-60% after their debuts. In fact, TRANSFORMERS topped the 4-million-attendance mark in just 11 days, and already has sold 4.2 million tickets. At this rate, the robot rumble seems all but assured to smash the current record for top foreign film in Korea, which is LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING at 6 million. Which would be a pretty significant record to break. With Korean hits topping 12 million admissions, 6 million is quite a gap (and that is for foreign films distributed by Korean companies... general opinion is for foreign films distributed directly by the foreign company, 5 million is the peak). Once TRANSFORMERS breaks that record, international distributors will have to re-evaluate the importance of Korea. In addition, TRANSFORMERS nearly maintained its stranglehold on the nation's movie theaters -- down a tick to 73.8% of all the tickets sold in Korea, from 75.5% last weekend. Not even THE HOST can boast that. FYI, TRANSFORMERS is also playing on 893 screens. Also pretty incredible, especially for a second weekend. I know a lot of people are calling for restrictions on the number of screens a single film can appear on, but I am not so sure that is a good idea. TRANSFORMERS also had the strongest per-screen average by far, indicating that people were getting to see what they wanted to see. It is not like there was pent up demand to see something else. Is it the theater owners' fault that audiences here have such uniform tastes? Title - Weekend Admissions - Total Nationwide Admissions 1. Transformers - 1,490,200 - 4,202,100 2. Black House - 139,400 - 1,169,300 3. The Descent - 102,600 - 123,100 4. Taxi 4 - 85,400 - 99,200 5. Ocean's 13 - 71,000 - 1,332,500 6. Shrek 3 - 58,000 - 2,792,700 7. Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End - 13,500 - 4,548,300 8. Secret Sunshine - 7,000 - 1,594,000 9. Love & Other Disasters - 5,300 - 262,000 10. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time - 4,300 - 50,800 Note: It appears that Film 2.0 has changed the way it track box office data. Instead of providing weekend information for Seoul and nationwide cumulative admissions, we now get nationwide for both. Which makes sense. Good for Film 2.0 if they can pull that off all the time. Mark Russell
