While much has been made of how
China’s massive cinema market finally restarted operations the previous week
after being closed by the COVID-19 outbreak, they were not actually the first
country in Asia to let movie-houses run once more. South Korea had its
reopening earlier, which explains the July 15 premier of “Peninsula,” a loose
sequel of sorts to the country’s 2016 zombie apocalypse blockbuster “Train to
Busan.” As the month comes down to its final week, the producers of “Peninsula”
can be proud that their film, despite being released amidst a pandemic with a
skittish movie-going audience, is now the highest-grossing 2020 Asian movie.
Inquirer.net has it that as of morning this Monday, July 27, Next
Entertainment World’s “Train to Busan” follow-up “Peninsula” has made it past
the break-even level, in terms of ticket sales, and start turning a profit. The
zombie thriller has sold 2.86 million tickets, which is over the even watermark
of 2.5 million, and only after 11 days on South Korean cinemas. From these
sales the box office for “Peninsula” has been calculated to 25.1 million won,
or $21 million. It is expected that come the following day, Tuesday July 28,
the film would have surpassed 3 million tickets sold.
And its home country is not the
only Asian nation that has been scared stiff all over again. “Peninsula” has
since premiered in theaters on Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and
Mongolia (the last one as of Friday last week, July 24) even as the COVID-10
situation remains precarious elsewhere. For Thailand’s release, “Peninsula”
actually broke the box-office record of its predecessor “Train to Busan” as
that nation’s best-received Korean film. Compare $1.3 million in Thai ticket
sales from “Peninsula” to “Busan” with “only” $650,000.
The film takes place in the same
setting as “Train to Busan,” with a prologue from the same timeframe as the
initial zombie outbreak and a main story four years later. A former Korean
marine (played by Gang Dong-won) and his brother-in-law (Kim Do-yoon) undertake
a secret operation from their evacuation point in Hong Kong, to return to the
UN-quarantined Korean peninsula, where they team up with a family of trapped survivors
led by a mother (Lee Jun-hyung) to escape from not just the zombie horde but a
former South Korean military unit turned rogue.
“Peninsula,” which was scheduled for
screening at Cannes 2020 before it was canceled by the pandemic, has a
confident release schedule for 185 countries around the world, and will
premiere in selected North American and European territories this coming
August.
Image courtesy of Straits Times
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