Na Hong-jin's 'Hope' Hits 4 Million Admissions Despite Divisive Early Reviews

Na Hong-jin's Hope has crossed 4 million cumulative admissions as of August 2nd, making it the third Korean film released this year to clear that threshold, according to distributor Plus M Entertainment.

The first two were Jang Hang-jun's The Man Who Lives With the King and Yeon Sang-ho's Gunche. Hope is now keeping pace with both.

The film is set at Hopo Port in the demilitarized zone, where an unidentified alien lifeform descends and tears the village apart. Hwang Jung-min, Jo In-sung, and Jung Ho-yeon lead the Korean cast, while the alien characters are played by Hollywood actors Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell. That casting choice alone was enough to get people through the door, even when opinions on the film itself were all over the place.

And they were. Hope mixes action, sci-fi, and comedy in a way that split audiences hard out of the gate. The genre-blending structure drew complaints from some critics and viewers, while others pointed to the film's scale and its sheer cinematic ambition as reasons to see it on the biggest screen possible. That divide didn't kill its momentum.

Plus M Entertainment noted that Hope recorded a daily seat sales rate of 44.3% on August 1st, holding its ground against a wave of anticipated foreign releases. The distributor framed the sustained run as proof of Korean cinema's competitiveness, calling it a "reverse-run" comeback, a term Korean industry observers use when a film builds audience word-of-mouth after a shaky opening weekend rather than front-loading and dropping.

Whether Hope keeps climbing depends on what hits theaters in the next few weeks, but 4 million admissions mid-competition with foreign blockbusters is not a small number for a film whose opening discourse was this messy.