Preamble

This month’s report consists of no fewer than two firsts for this series. First, we will expand our coverage to K-Film, that is, South Korean cinema. Second, we will consider some data which borders on the economic. Specifically, we will look at the gross lifetime box office earnings of a small selection of the South Korean films released over the early twenty first century. We focus on arguably the two South Korean directors most widely-known to international audiences, Park Chan-wook and Bong Jun-ho. Also included are two films which, impressionistically, also met with a high degree of international acclaim.

Given that we are working with a relatively small, simple dataset, this is also a good opportunity to demonstrate, explore, and discuss interactivity and animation for data visualisation.

The Data

All box office data was acquired from a freely available internet resource. We considered three regions: South Korea, Worldwide, and ‘Domestic’. The so-called ‘Domestic’ does not refer to a specific nation, but rather a wider region consisting of the USA, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Here, we will refer to this region as ‘North America’. The Worldwide region consists of North America, South Korea, and all other markets in which the film was released. A tabular summary of this small dataset can be found below.

Summary Box Office Information for International Breakout Korean Films
English Title Year Director Worldwide Gross South Korea Gross North America Gross
Oldboy 2003 Park Chan-wook $17,592,355 $1,882,334 $2,458,200
Mother 2009 Bong Joon-ho $17,271,439 $16,283,879 $551,509
Thirst 2009 Park Chan-wook $13,085,023 $11,950,322 $318,574
Snowpiercer 2014 Bong Joon-ho $86,758,912 $59,802,711 $4,563,650
The Handmaiden 2016 Park Chan-wook $37,863,670 $31,755,748 $2,006,788
Train to Busan 2016 Yeon Sang-ho $92,767,524 $80,466,363 $2,129,768
The Wailing 2016 Na Hong-jin $49,851,770 $48,609,277 $786,633
Parasite 2019 Bong Joon-ho $262,129,969 $71,439,010 $53,369,749
Decision to Leave 2022 Park Chan-wook $22,026,067 $14,197,603 $2,179,864

Static Visualisation

The following visualisation shows the lifetime box office gross of the films across three regions as identified in the preceding section. Films appear across the x-axis in order of release, with the earliest being furthest to the left and the most recent furthest to the right.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this visualistion is the panel devoted to North America. From this visualisation, it is not possible to discern whether there has been a general upward tendency in the gross lifetime box office of prominent Korean films in that region. Rather, it seems as if they are met with resounding commercial indifference. They are, rather, much more successful on the South Korean market, despite its much smaller consumer base. Indeed, the impressionistic visual similarity between the South Korea panel and the Worldwide panel is striking. Other than for the one extremely successful outlier, Parasite, it seems that the Korean Wave to date has not impacted greatly on the commercial success of Korean films which are distributed globally.

Interactive Visualisation

An alternative approach to comparing these patterns is to visualise all data points on the same graph, as below. There is, however, a considerable amount of overlap among the points, which may hinder interpretation. This issue can be addressed by adding interactivity. Not only does this visualisation include a hover-over tooltip, which provides precise details on the US dollar value of the lifetime gross box office that each point represents, regional series of points can be removed from the plotting area by clicking on the relevant region in the legend.

In this visualisation, the close relationship between the total worldwide box office of the films and their performance at the South Korean box office is emphasised. The relatively small scale of the North American box office is also thrown into sharp relief. By leveraging the features of interactivity, it also becomes more clear that Oldboy is unique among the films surveyed here in that it alone appears to have earned more in North America than South Korea.

Animated Visualisations

An alternative approach to displaying all data points on one graph is to do so sequentially, rather than simultaneously, and automatically, rather than at the discretion of the viewer. This we do in the animated visualisation below.

The above visualisation arguably does not reveal insights with the granularity of the static or interactive visualisations. The movement of the points, however, serves to emphasise the scale of the difference between the international commercial success of Parasite and every other film surveyed here. By zooming the animation as appropriate while we cycle through each region, the extent of this difference is further magnified. Indeed, it is only on that account that the scale on the y-axis need only zoom out to the extent it does, reflecting gross lifetime box office earnings in the hundreds of millions of US dollars rather than the tens of millions.

Conclusion

There are two sets of conclusions to draw from the foregoing. One relates to the Korean Wave, the other to visualisation. We deal with them each in turn.

From this very small sample of Korean films, it is not possible to draw definitive conclusions. As these films represent international breakouts among all the Korean films released over the early twenty first century, though, the finding that the lifetime box office gross of all but one of the films in South Korea makes up the vast majority of their worldwide box office gross suggests that South Korean films generally do not do well at the international box office. Furthermore, the only film to earn more in the North American region than South Korea was the earliest release of those surveyed. The earnings of Parasite at the North American and Worldwide box offices, then, do not appear to be part of a wider trend of growing commercial success for Korean cinema in these markets. This is a stark contrast with the gains seen in the chart success of K-Pop artists in international markets over the same time period. The Korean Wave, it seems, means different things across different media. While both K-Pop and Korean films have become far more visible outside of Korea over the early years of the twenty first century, this has translated into much higher sales in international markets for K-Pop, but more critical success and artistic recognition for Korean cinema rather than commercial success.

We now turn to the visualisations. It goes almost without saying that visualising the same data in different styles can emphasise different aspects of the data and, in so doing, influence viewer interpretation. Here, however, we have demonstrated that different approaches to the same data displayed on the same style of visualisation, that is, whether the same dot plot is static, interactive, or animated, can also emphasise or clarify different aspects of the data. There is no neutral presentation of the data, so determining which aspect is to be emphasised should be decided on a case-by-case basis, depending on the audience and purpose of the visualisation.

Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-OLU-2250004)