Box office starts to bounce back over the holiday weekend

Movies

Published: 04 May. 2020, 19:38

Box office starts to bounce back over the holiday weekend

From Left: Legsly (Ester Dean), Guy Diamond (Kunal Nayyar), Tiny Diamond (Kenan Thompson), Smidge (Walt Dohrn), Biggie (James Corden), Mr. Dinkles (Kevin Michael Richardson), Satin (Aino Jawo) and Chenille (Caroline Hjelt) in DreamWorks Animation’s Trolls World Tour, directed by Walt Dohrn. [UNIVERSAL PICTURES]

Box office sales may be on the way to recovering as the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus continue to hover near the single digits daily.

Over the four-day weekend that included Buddha’s Birthday and Labor Day, 327,000 people visited theaters nationwide. For the first time in a month and half, daily box office sales recorded more than 100,000 moviegoers on Thursday.

Cinemas still have a long way to go. Last year during the same period, an average of 1.2 million tickets were sold daily over the holidays.

The top spot was taken by American animated film “Trolls World Tour,” attracting 46,000 people to 311 screens over the four days. Featuring the voices of Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake, Ron Funches, James Corden, Kelly Clarkson and more, the film is a jukebox musical centering around the queen of the pop troll tribe, Poppy, and her friends attempting to save their tribe from the evil Queen Barb of the rock musical tribe, who hopes to rule over all six troll tribes.

The Chinese romantic film “Love the Way You Are” ranked second with 34,000 people seeing the film across 533 screenings. The film features Chinese actor Song Wilong and Taiwanese actor Vivian Sung as childhood friends whose relationship evolves into something more as they grow older.

Local horror film “Hotel Lake” landed in third place, drawing 30,000 people to 461 screens. The movie tells the story of two sisters who enter a haunted hotel filled with weird rules and a creepy owner. Actors Lee Se-young and Park Soi portray the sisters while actor Park Ji-young plays the hotel owner.

Meanwhile, the monthly box office for April hit an all-time low according to a Korean Film Council report. A total of 972,337 tickets were sold over the month, a poor figure compared to the year before, when 13.3 million tickets were sold. It was the first time that monthly sales fell below 1 million since the organization began compiling box office data in 2004.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]