How the Assassins Box Office Controversy Backfired on Its Critics

South Korean thriller Assassins has become the fifth Korean film released this year to pass three million admissions, crossing the mark on October 12, its 20th day in theaters. The milestone is striking because the film reached it while the Assassins box office controversy swirled around it, with boycott campaigns, a police investigation, and protests staged outside a lead actor's home.

The film opened on September 23 and topped the overall box office for three consecutive weeks. In its third week it drew 758,587 moviegoers, nearly ninety thousand more than the week before, according to ticketing data from the Korean Film Council reported by SBS Star. Verified-viewer scores climbed alongside attendance, with the film's NAVER rating rising to nearly nine as word of mouth spread.

Viewer verdicts have moved in the same direction. Verified-viewer scores on NAVER rose into the high eights as the controversy peaked, and the CGV Golden Egg index trended upward too, according to the Seoul Economic Daily. Viewers quoted in Korean outlets praised the cast's performances, the direction, and a tightly built story, with several saying they planned to see it again.

Yoo Hae-jin stars as a police inspector who witnesses the shooting at the center of the story and leads the investigation, with Park Hae-il as a newspaper social affairs editor and Lee Min-ho as a rookie reporter. The film ends without naming a single culprit, and its makers describe it as a fictional reconstruction rather than a historical verdict. That open ending is what turned a film review into the Assassins box office controversy.

The history dispute behind the backlash

The story dramatizes the August 15, 1974 attack at Seoul's National Theater, where First Lady Yuk Young-soo was killed during a Liberation Day ceremony. The official inquiry at the time blamed Mun Se-gwang, who investigators said acted alone. The film imagines that other forces may have been involved, and critics called that suggestion a distortion of the historical record. The argument quickly moved past film criticism and into politics.

Former Seoul councilor Lee Jong-bae asked police to investigate director Heo Jin-ho, producer Kim Won-kuk, and the film's screenwriters for defamation, saying the plural title invites viewers to suspect a second culprit. Threats then followed against the cast, including Yoo Hae-jin, and a conservative group rallied outside a lead actor's residence. Police began providing protective measures for Yoo on October 6, and the cast canceled its stage greetings plus scheduled appearances at the Busan International Film Festival. The production team said in a statement that the film identifies no individual as the mastermind behind the attack. STARNEWS noted the same defiance in its own coverage, reporting that audiences kept turning up at multiplexes despite the political noise (STARNEWS on Assassins topping three million admissions).

Why the fight may have helped the film

Observers in the Korean press noted that the attacks appeared to backfire. As the Assassins box office controversy escalated, more viewers told reporters they wanted to see the film and judge for themselves instead of trusting rumors. Third-week attendance rose rather than fell, an unusual pattern for a film that deep into its run without a holiday to lift it. A longer account of the dispute can be read here: SBS Star's report on the film passing three million admissions.

Boycott lists and one-star review campaigns have become a familiar weapon in Korea's culture wars, and this case followed the pattern: rating sites filled with low scores from people who had not seen the film, while verified-viewer ratings told the opposite story. The gap between the two scores became its own talking point, and several Korean outlets framed the attendance surge as audiences rejecting the pressure campaign.

The production reportedly cost 19 billion won, and trade estimates put its break-even point near four million admissions. The Assassins box office controversy may have done the film's marketing for free, but with no more holidays on the calendar, the rest of the run depends on whether word of mouth keeps pulling in viewers, SBS Star reported. Whatever the final tally, the episode has reopened a familiar argument in Korean cinema over how much license fiction deserves when it touches living history, and how quickly a quarrel about the past can turn into a fight about the present.