Park Chan-wook is witnessing a disaster in Korean cinema firsthand.
Korean cinema is dealing with its steepest downturn in 20 years, with nationwide admissions plunging to only 40.7 million within the first half of 2025, down from 62.9 million a 12 months earlier and on monitor to fall under the symbolic annual 100 million mark for the primary time since 2004, excluding the pandemic years. A dearth of home blockbusters, rising competitors from streaming platforms and shopper belt-tightening are drivers of the droop, which threatens to upend one in all Asia’s most dynamic theatrical markets. The business is at the moment confronting an existential menace to its once-thriving theatrical tradition.
“I believe that it’s not a lot the disaster of cinema. It’s a disaster of the film theaters,” Park tells Selection on the Busan Worldwide Movie Competition, the place his newest thriller “No Different Selection” was the opening movie. “However I additionally suppose, in flip, the disaster of the film theaters is definitely, the truth is, the disaster of cinema.”
He provides: “The viewers is coming all collectively in entrance of an enormous display screen the place expertise is standardized, you might be virtually locked in on this darkish, darkish room. You’ll be able to’t go away, you’ll be able to’t pause it, and you might be utterly severed from any type of temptations or inside or exterior parts. I can not think about cinema something aside from that have.”
However Park expresses hope that “No Different Selection,” that includes A-list stars Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin, “may play even a small position in bringing again the viewers who’ve left the theaters to return house.”
The movie’s exploration of middle-class desperation and automation couldn’t be extra well timed. Lee performs Man-su, a laid-off paper manufacturing specialist who resorts to serial homicide to remove his rivals for a single job opening, solely to find the place exists to oversee AI testing.
“This can be a story concerning the wishes of the center class of in the present day,” Park explains. “Regardless of what sort of hardship you might come throughout, this can be very arduous, they deny to simply accept the autumn of the present state of dwelling that you’ve maintained up till now.”
The director attracts uncomfortable parallels between his protagonist’s plight and broader labor considerations. “After eliminating all of his human rivals, the place that he earns because of that, how lengthy will that place final? Was all of it for useless?” Park says, noting that within the movie’s closing scene, the AI’s automated lights-out system pushes Man-su out of the manufacturing unit. “Is Man-su’s wrestle all in useless? Is all of it meaningless?”
Park additionally addresses his current expulsion from the Writers Guild of America, together with co-writer Don McKellar, for allegedly writing throughout the 2023 strike whereas engaged on HBO’s “The Sympathizer.”
“We didn’t suppose or contemplate that we have been writing throughout the strike,” Park says. “I’m not solely the author, however I’m additionally the director and producer, and there are specific issues that wanted to be executed, you already know, sharing of concepts which aren’t precise acts of writing. So I do suppose it’s unlucky that it was interpreted in another way.”
Regardless of the controversy, Park emphasizes his help for the union’s mission. “Nonetheless, that isn’t to say that we disagree with the mission or objective of WGA strike. We totally perceive and we additionally totally agree and help their actions, and that stands nonetheless in the present day.”
Trying again at BIFF’s 30-year historical past, Park displays on the competition’s transformative position in increasing horizons for Korean audiences.
“For a really very long time, [for] Korean moviegoers, when you concentrate on a film, it was normally centered on Korean movies or American movies, and specifically, massive scale Hollywood movies,” he says. “When the Busan Worldwide Competition was established 30 years in the past, I believe it introduced consciousness to the truth that we all the time knew there have been Asian movies that existed, however we weren’t actually conscious of it.”
The director notes that the competition helped audiences “notice how simply how far we have been from really with the ability to perceive what individuals which can be racially and geographically very near us, what they’re pondering, and the way experiencing that by movie could be impactful.”
“No Different Selection” incorporates a stellar ensemble together with Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min, Yeom Hye-ran and Cha Seung-won alongside leads Lee and Son. The movie beforehand competed on the Venice Movie Competition and is produced by Moho Movie and KG Productions.
