필사 모드: Korean Film and Drama Roundup 2025-2026 — The Year Theaters Came Back, the Year OTT Got Reshuffled

• Introduction — The Question Left by the Number 16.91 Million
• The Year Theaters Came Back — The Box Office Hits That Made the First Half of 2026
  • The King's Warden
  • HUMINT
  • Colony
  • HOPE
• The Master's Answer — Films That Premiered at Festivals First
  • No Other Choice
  • The Old Woman with the Knife
• Genre Held the Line in Theaters in 2025
  • My Daughter is a Zombie
  • Yadang: The Snitch
  • Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy
• The Format Netflix Built
  • When Life Gives You Tangerines
  • Weak Hero Class 2
  • Squid Game Season 3
  • You and Everything Else
  • True Education
  • The Great Flood
• Where the Broadcasters Held Their Ground
  • The Tyrant's Chef
  • The Story of Section Chief Kim, Homeowner in Seoul, Employee at a Conglomerate
  • Made in Korea
• The List at a Glance
• Closing — As Scale Grew Bigger, the Questions Got Smaller

Introduction — The Question Left by the Number 16.91 Million

The most frequently cited number in the Korean film market in the first half of 2026 is 16.91 million. That's the admissions count for The King's Warden, Jang Hang-jun's period drama. Per the Korean Film Council's first-half report, this single film brought in 163.1 billion won in revenue, and total Korean film revenue for the first half of 2026 rose 81.7 percent year over year.

Judging by the numbers alone, it looks like theaters are back. And yet a substantial share of the most-discussed titles over the same period never played in a theater at all. Netflix's True Education logged 48.2 million views within a month of release, and Kim Da-mi's The Great Flood held the number one spot on Netflix's non-English film chart for four straight weeks.

So 2025 and the first half of 2026 don't resolve into a single direction. Theaters recovered, and at the same time, what happens outside theaters grew even bigger. This piece puts both trends side by side. It covers 18 titles, noting where to watch each only when confirmed. Only the premise of each is introduced, not the turns of the story.

The Year Theaters Came Back — The Box Office Hits That Made the First Half of 2026

In the first half of 2026, theaters filled up in turn with period drama, espionage, zombies, and creature features. What they had in common was that all of them were big-budget genre films.

The King's Warden

February 2026 · Directed by Jang Hang-jun · Starring Yoo Hae-jin, Park Ji-hoon, Yoo Ji-tae, Jeon Mi-do — Cine21 details

A period drama set against the backdrop of King Danjong's exile after King Sejo's usurpation and the plot to install Prince Geumseong. Whether Jang Hang-jun, directing a period piece for the first time, could pull it off was the biggest question going in, and the result was a cumulative 16.91 million admissions, the highest box office gross of all time. At the 62nd Baeksang Arts Awards, Yoo Hae-jin won the Grand Prize in Film and Park Ji-hoon won Best New Actor. Rather than push the weighty historical material head-on, the film chose to put its weight on the relationships between characters.

Who'll love it — Audiences who like period dramas but are drawn more to the human relationships than battle scale. Who won't — Viewers who want dense political tension from a historical film.

HUMINT

February 2026 · Directed by Ryoo Seung-wan · Starring Jo In-sung, Park Jung-min, Park Hae-joon, Shin Se-kyung — Wikipedia

A spy-action film that begins when a black-ops NIS agent tracking an international crime syndicate in Southeast Asia has to face the death of an informant they'd been running. The official record calls it an accident, but a coded message the informant left behind tells a different story, and the trail leads to Vladivostok. It picks the theme director Ryoo Seung-wan has kept returning to — how an organization uses up an individual — and reworks it inside the spy genre. Cumulative admissions came to 1.98 million, a disappointing result relative to the film's scale.

Who'll love it — Audiences who prefer the Berlin side of Ryoo Seung-wan to the Veteran side. Who won't — Viewers who want a clean, legible information game from a spy thriller.

Colony

May 2026 · Directed by Yeon Sang-ho · Starring Jun Ji-hyun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Shin Hyun-been — Cine21 details

A zombie thriller that begins when a researcher attending a biotech conference gets trapped by a virus spread through bioterrorism. Its core premise is that the infected keep mutating inside a sealed building, and Yeon Sang-ho co-wrote the screenplay with writer Choi Gyu-seok. It premiered at Cannes on May 16, then opened domestically on May 21, passing 5 million admissions 24 days after release and landing at number two for the first half of the year. Rather than the high-speed momentum of Train to Busan, it leans into sustained pressure within a confined space.

Who'll love it — Audiences who want the psychology of a sealed space rather than scale from a zombie film. Who won't — Viewers already fatigued by Korean zombie films.

HOPE

July 2026 · Directed by Na Hong-jin · Starring Hwang Jung-min, Jo In-sung, Jung Ho-yeon, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender — Wikipedia

A police chief and officer at a rural substation, in a village left with almost no one but the elderly, try to protect the village, while up in the mountains, people who'd been hunting a monster find themselves the ones being hunted. A creature feature running 156 minutes, putting Korean and international actors in the same frame, and it competed for the Palme d'Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. It's the film Na Hong-jin spent years preparing after The Wailing, so both anticipation and worry were present well before release.

Who'll love it — Audiences who counted The Wailing's refusal to explain itself as a strength. Who won't — Viewers who struggle with a long runtime and an ending that doesn't resolve.

The Master's Answer — Films That Premiered at Festivals First

Korean cinema's international presence in 2025 was built at festivals, not at the box office. Two films in particular carried that.

No Other Choice

September 2025 · Directed by Park Chan-wook · Starring Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Lee Sung-min, Yeom Hye-ran — Wikipedia

A black-comedy thriller in which a veteran of the paper industry, pushed out after 25 years at the same company, moves toward an extreme choice to get a job again. Based on Donald Westlake's novel The Ax, it had its world premiere in competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in August 2025 and received a nine-minute standing ovation. It went on to open the 30th Busan International Film Festival before its domestic release on September 24, drawing a cumulative 2.94 million admissions, 10th place at the Korean box office for 2025. It won Best Picture in Film at the 62nd Baeksang Arts Awards.

Submitted as Korea's entry for Best International Feature at the 98th Academy Awards, it made the 15-film shortlist but didn't make the final five. Across a 34-year directing career, Park Chan-wook has never yet been nominated for an Oscar.

Who'll love it — Audiences comfortable watching a middle-aged man's downfall play out alongside laughter. Who won't — Viewers who find it hard to sit with unemployment being used as material for jokes.

The Old Woman with the Knife

April 2025 · Directed by Min Kyu-dong · Starring Lee Hye-young, Kim Sung-cheol, Yeon Woo-jin — Cine21 details

An action drama depicting the standoff between a woman in her sixties who has worked as a contract killer for more than 40 years and a young killer who has spent his whole life hunting her. Based on the novel of the same name by Gu Byeong-mo, it was invited to the Berlinale Special section of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival for its world premiere. Lee Hye-young walked the Berlin red carpet for the first time in 40 years, since 1985. Cumulative admissions came to around 530,000, a result far from box office success, but simply putting a woman in her sixties at the center of an action film was rare in itself for Korean cinema.

Who'll love it — Audiences who want to see what an actor's face can carry more than what a fight choreography can. Who won't — Readers expecting the exact density of the source novel.

Genre Held the Line in Theaters in 2025

Almost every Korean film to draw a million-plus in Korean theaters in 2025 was a clearly defined genre film. Three titles show this trend well.

My Daughter is a Zombie

July 2025 · Directed by Pil Gam-sung · Starring Jo Jung-suk — Cine21 details

A wildlife curator father hides in a seaside village to protect his daughter, who's been infected with a zombie virus. It wears the shell of a zombie film but functions closer to a family comedy, and that mismatch is both the film's judgment call and its limitation. It was the first release of 2025 to pass 5 million admissions, finishing with a total of 5.64 million, the highest-grossing Korean film of the year.

Who'll love it — Audiences comfortable with a genre setup used as a device for an emotional drama. Who won't — Viewers who wanted horror and social commentary from a zombie film.

Yadang: The Snitch

April 2025 · Directed by Hwang Byung-kook · Starring Kang Ha-neul, Yoo Hae-jin, Park Hae-joon — Cine21 details

A crime thriller that unfolds after a wrongfully imprisoned man accepts a prosecutor's offer to become a drug-crime informant, a so-called "yadang." It's built around a structure where the informant, the prosecutor, and a detective each get tangled up in the same case, each running their own calculations. It drew a cumulative 3.37 million admissions, placing it among the top Korean box office earners of 2025, and an extended cut was separately released in August.

Who'll love it — Audiences who enjoy the familiar rhythm of Korean-style crime noir. Who won't — Viewers who feel the way the film handles prosecutors and the press is exaggerated.

Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy

July 2025 · Directed by Kim Byung-woo · Starring Ahn Hyo-seop, Lee Min-ho, Chae Soo-bin, Nana, Jisoo — Cine21 details

The story of an office worker whose ten years of solitary reading a web novel suddenly become reality. Based on the web novel of the same name by author Singshong and distributed by Lotte Entertainment, it was an attempt to compress a massive IP into a single live-action feature, and expectations from the source material's fan base were extremely high from the start.

Who'll love it — Audiences who want to enjoy a world-building action film without knowing the source material. Who won't — Readers who find it hard to tolerate the compression of the source's vast lore.

The Format Netflix Built

The international reach of Korean content in this period was effectively told through Netflix's own metrics. The format followed the platform too. Six- and ten-episode runs moved into a space where 16 episodes used to be the standard.

When Life Gives You Tangerines

March 2025 · Directed by Kim Won-seok, written by Lim Sang-choon · Starring IU, Park Bo-gum, Moon So-ri, Park Hae-joon · Netflix, 16 episodes — Wikipedia

A drama that follows one woman's life across four seasons, starting from 1950s Jeju. It splits the same character between youth and later middle age, casting two different actors, and that handoff is what builds the show's emotional architecture. It hit number one globally on Netflix's non-English series chart right after release and held the Top 10 for 8 weeks.

Who'll love it — Viewers who like a drama that builds emotion through the accumulation of time rather than through plot events. Who won't — Viewers uneasy with direction that explicitly demands tears.

Weak Hero Class 2

April 2025 · Netflix — Wikipedia

A follow-up, three years later, to Weak Hero Class 1, which originated as a Wavve original, moved for this release to Netflix. It hit number two globally on Netflix's TV chart within a day of release and held number one in several countries across South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Opinion split on whether its handling of school violence broadened from Season 1 or simply became scattered.

Who'll love it — Viewers who remember Season 1's dense action choreography. Who won't — Viewers for whom the intensity of the school-violence depiction itself is a lot to take.

Squid Game Season 3

June 2025 · Directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk · Netflix, 6 episodes — Wikipedia

Conceived as the series' final chapter, released simultaneously in more than 190 countries on June 27, 2025. Many readings held that the shorter, six-episode structure was a direct response to Season 2's pacing feeling stretched out. The global buzz was as strong as ever, but domestic reaction was noticeably cooler compared to Season 1.

Who'll love it — Viewers who stuck with the series to the end, and those who want the shape of the ending itself to be an argument. Who won't — Viewers who wanted Season 1's freshness to return.

You and Everything Else

September 2025 · Netflix, 15 episodes · Starring Kim Go-eun, Park Ji-hyun — Wikipedia

A drama centered on the long relationship between two women. It won Best Drama and Best Screenplay in Television at the 62nd Baeksang Arts Awards, and Kim Go-eun won the Grand Prize at the 5th Blue Dragon Series Awards. Stronger with critics than with box office-style viewership metrics, it's a good illustration of the character of Netflix's Korean 2025 lineup.

Who'll love it — Viewers who want to sit for a long time with a relationship where friendship and jealousy aren't cleanly separable. Who won't — Viewers who find 15 episodes of emotional tracking without a major event tedious.

True Education

June 2026 · Directed by Hong Jong-chan · Starring Kim Moo-yeol, Lee Sung-min, Jin Ki-joo, Pyo Ji-hoon · Netflix, 10 episodes — Netflix 2026 Korea lineup

Based on the Naver webtoon of the same name, set against a collapsed education system as its backdrop. Director Hong Jong-chan, who made Juvenile Justice and Mr. Plankton, directed. It logged 48.2 million views within a month of release, landing in the top-six range of Netflix's global viewership for the first half of 2026, and topped a June Gallup Korea survey with a 10.7 percent preference rating. How the show handles private retribution sparked debate from the moment it released.

Who'll love it — Viewers looking for the catharsis of a clean structure of retribution. Who won't — Viewers who resist a narrative that settles violence with violence.

The Great Flood

December 2025 · Directed by Kim Byung-woo · Starring Kim Da-mi, Park Hae-soo · Netflix — Netflix official page

A disaster sci-fi film set in an apartment complex slowly going under in a great flood. It premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in September 2025 before going straight to Netflix on December 19. It logged a cumulative 27.9 million views within three days of release, hit number one in 54 countries, and held the number one spot in the non-English film category for four straight weeks. Domestic reaction was mixed, though: Naver's audience rating sat at 3.84 out of 10, and on Rotten Tomatoes it scored 60 percent from critics and 41 percent from audiences.

Director Kim Byung-woo released two films the same year, Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy and The Great Flood, and both drew similar criticism about whether the story could actually support such a large-scale premise.

Who'll love it — Viewers who can tolerate uneven execution as long as a disaster film has a big idea. Who won't — Viewers who find it hard to accept a mismatch between the scale of the premise and the density of the storytelling.

Where the Broadcasters Held Their Ground

Talk only about Netflix and you miss half of this period. Terrestrial channels, cable, and Disney+ accounted for a substantial share of domestic buzz.

The Tyrant's Chef

2025 · tvN weekend drama · Starring Lim Yoon-ah, Lee Chae-min — Namuwiki

A fusion period romance premised on a modern French-cuisine chef being sent back to the Joseon dynasty. It closed out with a peak rating of 17.1 percent, finishing as the number one tvN drama of 2025 overall and setting a record as the highest-rated miniseries of the year for the network. It became the first tvN drama to hold the number one spot on Netflix's global non-English TV show chart for two consecutive weeks. Its cumulative YouTube views in the first week of broadcast reached roughly 80 million.

Who'll love it — Viewers watching for the chemistry between the two leads more than the plausibility of the premise. Who won't — Viewers already tired of time-slip period romance tropes.

The Story of Section Chief Kim, Homeowner in Seoul, Employee at a Conglomerate

October-November 2025 · JTBC weekend drama · Starring Ryu Seung-ryong — Wikipedia

The story of Kim Nak-soo, a fifty-something head of household who owns his home in Seoul and works at a conglomerate. The title alone already states the show's whole theme. Ryu Seung-ryong won the Grand Prize in Television at the 62nd Baeksang Arts Awards for this role, becoming the first person to win a standalone Grand Prize in both the film and television categories.

Who'll love it — Viewers who want to watch a middle-aged office worker's self-awareness played for both laughs and a bitter aftertaste at once. Who won't — Viewers who find the anxieties of this specific social class tiresome as a subject in itself.

Made in Korea

December 2025 · Disney+, 6 episodes · Starring Hyun Bin, Jung Woo-sung — Wikipedia

Set against 1970s Korean modern history, it depicts the standoff between a man who's an intelligence agent by day and a businessman by night, and the prosecutor who pursues him relentlessly. It was released on Disney+ and Hulu on December 24, 2025, and Hyun Bin won Best Actor in Television at the 62nd Baeksang Arts Awards for this role. A second season is in production, expected to release in the second half of 2026.

Who'll love it — Viewers interested in modern Korean history used as the stage for a crime drama. Who won't — Viewers who feel the weight of the era is too large to fit into six episodes.

The List at a Glance

For some dramas in the table, the director column shows the platform or channel in place of a confirmed director credit.

Closing — As Scale Grew Bigger, the Questions Got Smaller

Line up these 18 titles and one thing becomes visible. Budgets and reach clearly grew, but the questions the work itself asks got narrower instead. A 16.91-million-admission period drama and a series with 48.2 million views both came out within the same half-year, and both chose to hit emotional beats audiences already knew precisely, rather than take a risk.

On the other side sit the films that didn't hit commercially. The Old Woman with the Knife, seen by 530,000 people. HUMINT, seen by 1.98 million. The Great Flood, which drew a split reception. It's hard to call these films failures. But they show roughly how much cost an unconventional attempt currently requires within the Korean film industry.

Made in Korea Season 2 is scheduled for the second half of 2026, and the results of the summer theatrical season haven't landed yet. Only one thing is certain right now. A well-made genre film still draws people into theaters, and a well-made series still reaches the world without one. The two paths haven't split apart — it's that the people making the work now have to decide, from the very start, which one they're choosing.