Yu Hae-jin Tops the Box Office TWICE in One Year with Assassin(s)

Assassin(s) opened at number one in Korean cinemas on the 23rd, drawing 134,464 admissions on its first day and clearing the opening scores of both The Man Living With the King and Humint, the films that led the Lunar New Year box office earlier this year. That comparison matters in practical terms: both of those titles pulled around 110,000 admissions on their respective debuts, meaning Assassin(s) arrived at Chuseok with enough momentum to suggest the holiday run could go further than either.

The film is the latest feature from director Heo Jin-ho, whose credits include Deokhy the Last Princess and Forbidden Dream. It is produced by Hive Media Corp, the same company behind Seoul Spring, the 2023 political thriller that became one of the highest-grossing Korean films of that year. That association generated notable pre-release attention, and the opening numbers appear to justify it.

Three men, one event

The film is built around the real shooting that took place on August 15, 1974, during the 29th Liberation Day ceremony. South Korean First Lady Yuk Young-soo was fatally struck by a bullet while President Park Chung-hee was delivering a speech. The official account identified the gunman as Mun Se-gwang, a Korean resident of Japan with links to a pro-North Korea organization, and the case was closed quickly. What the film pursues is the space between that official conclusion and the questions that have never fully disappeared in the five decades since.

Three characters approach the event from different angles. Park Cheol-gu (Yu Hae-jin) is a police officer whose faith in state authority fractures as his investigation runs up against forces that seem to want certain lines left uncrossed. Kim Jae-hwan (Park Hae-il) is a newspaper section chief who works quietly but persistently against the censorship that defines the Yushin era. Han Yeong-il (Lee Min-ho) is the youngest reporter at the paper, less careful and more combustible than his colleagues, which the film uses to inject energy into scenes that might otherwise sit still.

Park Hae-il is reuniting with Heo Jin-ho for the first time since Deokhy the Last Princess a decade ago. The gap between collaborations gives their shared scenes a weight that the film earns rather than announces.

Layers behind the title

The film's Korean title stylizes the word for "assassins" with the plural marker placed inside parentheses, a grammatical choice that the film uses as an argument: the event was not the act of a single individual but something that drew in, wittingly or not, a wide circle of people with competing interests. A character played by Jung Woo-sung, introduced as Han Yeong-il's older brother and a businessman tied to national projects, frames his choices around patriotism; Kim Jae-hwan frames his around truth. The tension between those two orientations, both credible within the world the film constructs, is where most of the film's political weight sits.

The supporting cast includes Park Jung-min as the officially identified gunman Mun Se-gwang, alongside Shim Eun-kyung, Oh Dal-su, Oh Jung-se, Shin Hyun-bin, and Bae Sung-woo in additional roles. Reviewers have cited the period production design as one of the film's stronger elements, with location detail and costuming that make 1974 feel inhabited rather than reconstructed.

Audience response on opening day was strong: CGV's audience satisfaction index came in at 95 percent, and the film held the top advance booking position across all three major Korean chains. At 131 minutes and rated for viewers 12 and older, Assassin(s) opened on the 23rd and is now in wide release.