hankyoreh

One of the most important steps taken by the Korean Film Council (KOFIC) to support Korean film was to increase access to box office information. Every Tuesday, one can download extensive data for the previous week’s ticket sales covering the majority of theaters in the country. KOFIC also emails foreign journalists monthly updates of the figures in English, broken down into pages of neutral statistics.

This is quite an important move for the promotion of Korean film because it practically spoon-feeds stories to the media. "The King and the Clown" only received its overseas festival premiere this month, but it has already received extensive exposure in the international press for its at-the-time record-breaking run. Business-oriented Screen International and Variety, for example, ran three stories apiece with mention of ’Clown’ in the headline, as well as several periphery articles on the film.

In Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, box office statistics are compiled by private organizations who sell the information back to local distributors. In Taiwan, data is e-mailed out five days a week, covering the previous day’s box office for each film at each theater in Taipei. With such comprehensive information, distributors can determine which venue could work best for which of their titles so as to maximize success. Hong Kong’s industry association even tracks the weather so that one can factor downpours into one’s analysis of box office figures.

However, though data in Taiwan is distributed five days a week, the information only covers the Taipei box office. The big picture is far less rosy. Distribution in Taiwan is dominated by the major American companies, who generate almost 90 percent of box office revenue there. Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, UIP, and Buena Vista have their own offices in Taiwan for the marketing and distribution of their parent companies’ titles. They manage their own private box office information system, taking turns to compile the data each week, compiled not just from Taipei but nationwide. Because these distributors have the most comprehensive information, they can massage the statistics to reflect more kindly on their own titles.

In August 2005, the major Hollywood distributors were caught red-handed in a ’statistics massage’ that backfired. Both Screen International and Variety reported that Thai action movie "Tom Yum Goong" was the most popular film in Hong Kong, both on opening night and over its first weekend of release. However, the publications also ran a separate, conflicting story announcing that "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" was the number one film in Hong Kong, stating explicitly that it had beaten out its Thai competiter. The second report was based on optimistic U.S. studio data, however, which included a statistical prediction of the film’s Sunday evening ticket sales. Both publications printed retractions, noting that the winner was indeed the Thai film.

In Hong Kong, the studios were able to be challenged because reliable statistics are available from an independent source. This is extremely important, as a film like "Tom Yum Goong" needs all the help it can get to fight public prejudice in other parts of Asia against Southeast Asian cinema. In Taiwan, however, nobody is able to dispute a major distributor’s claims regarding nationwide box office figures because rival distributors do not have access to the needed data until weeks later. Only the major distributors have the power to secure prompt figures every night from cinemas, who depend on the big film firms for most of their income.

In China and Southeast Asia, box office data is elusive. Until such data is readily available, these markets cannot be considered professional film industries. Box office data does not only influence which films reach theaters and how films are distributed, but also which films are actually produced in the first place. Without this important resource, Asian film industries will always be one step behind Hollywood - and this is somewhere KOFIC doesn’t plan to be.