Assassin(s) Falls From #1 as History-Distortion Row Drags In Uninvolved Stars

The controversy surrounding Korean film Assassin(s) has jumped the screen and landed on people who had nothing to do with making it.

Actresses Lee Young-ae and Kim Go-eun attended the film's VIP preview screening on the 21st and left handwritten blurbs afterward. Kim Go-eun wrote that the film left her "feeling deeply grateful for the present." Lee Young-ae called it "thrillingly and movingly good." Standard preview-circuit stuff. Then the history-distortion argument caught fire, and both women's social media accounts started collecting hostile comments from users demanding they account for their praise.

What the film is and why it's controversial

Directed by Heo Jin-ho and starring Yoo Hae-jin, Park Hae-il, and Lee Min-ho, Assassin(s) is built around the 1974 shooting of First Lady Yuk Young-soo during a Liberation Day ceremony broadcast live on national television. The film uses that real event as a launchpad and layers in fictional hypotheses about who may have orchestrated the attack, with some scenes raising the possibility that figures connected to then-President Park Chung-hee's administration or the Korean Central Intelligence Agency were involved.

The People Power Party and the Park Chung-hee Presidential Memorial Foundation came out against the film almost immediately, calling those scenes historical distortion. The pushback escalated on the 28th when former Seoul city councilman Lee Jong-bae of the People Power Party filed a criminal complaint with the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, accusing director Heo and the production team of defamation through false statements of fact. Lee also argued that the film's title itself, with its parenthetical plural, implies the existence of additional perpetrators beyond the documented shooter Moon Se-gwang.

The production team pushed back the same day with an official statement: "This film was not made to newly establish a specific historical conclusion or to deny or distort existing facts." They added that it is a dramatic fiction built on documented records from the period, combined with creative imagination, and that no character in the film is identified as the mastermind behind the attack.

Ratings, a vanished review, and a one-way box office race

The conflict is showing up in the numbers, and the gap is hard to ignore. As of the morning of the 29th, the film's verified-ticket-buyer score on Naver sat at 8.3 out of 10. Its general netizen score sat at 2.2. That kind of split, nearly six points between people who actually watched it and people rating it on principle, usually signals organized voting rather than genuine audience disagreement.

On YouTube, film critic Lee Dong-jin's channel saw his Assassin(s) review, posted on the 25th through the Btv series Lee Dong-jin's Paiakia, flooded with comments and debate well beyond his usual traffic. More notably, a review video posted by the film YouTube channel Jimovie, which has 4.17 million subscribers, appears to have been removed from the channel. Jimovie has not explained the deletion, so whether it's connected to the controversy is unconfirmed.

At the multiplex, Assassin(s) lost its five-day consecutive hold on first place. On the 28th, Tazza: Song of Beelzebub, which opened the same day as Assassin(s) on the 23rd, pulled ahead by just 1,504 admissions: 68,911 to 67,407. The film's cumulative audience stands at 1,633,622. Tazza has pulled in 901,927 total. A 1,500-person gap on a single day is not a collapse, but the direction of travel matters, and the noise outside the theater isn't helping.