The spring when Cannes forgot Korea,
theaters held on with just one opposition party

On April 16, 2025, the lineup of invited titles for the 78th Cannes International Film Festival was released. There was not a single Korean feature among them. For the first time in 26 years—since 1999—Korean feature films failed to be selected in any category, whether competition, non‑competition, Directors’ Week, or Critics’ Week, in both the official and unofficial sections. The only Korean works listed were director Jeong Yu‑mi’s short animated film “Glasses,” which appeared in Critics’ Week, and director Heo Ga‑young’s short “First Summer,” which was entered by the Cinéfondation. In just one quarter, the country of Bong Joon‑ho, Park Chan‑wook, and Hong Sang‑soo turned into a nation with “zero invitations.”

The reason this incident defines the second quarter is not merely a matter of pride. Cannes’s lineup serves as a mirror reflecting which films Korea was planning—and who it entrusted with the camera—two to three years earlier. This spring, 2025, that mirror was empty. And during the same quarter, the same void was confirmed in domestic theaters.

The industry's diagnosis quickly converged on a single point. One film critic said that commercial movies focus solely on “making a profit” by relying on the star system, and even independent films chase safety instead of new currents, describing the current situation as “a stagnant state with no new challenges.” The key phrase is 'safe movies'. As the post‑pandemic theater slump and investment slowdown persisted, production shifted back to proven genres and familiar faces rather than taking artistic risks.

The numbers back this up. Investment and distribution companies rooted in large conglomerates have maintained their conservative stance, narrowing the planning and development stage itself. The result is a lineup that exists only at the extremes: on one end, a handful of big-budget films targeting peak season; on the other, low-budget independent films. With the “midsection” of mid-budget films vanishing, the very ground needed to nurture ambitious, well-crafted medium-scale films—the kind Cannes would favor—has dried up. Cannes’s empty list precisely points to the collapse of Korean cinema’s midsection.

The landscape of domestic theaters tells a similar story. The crime drama “Yadang,” released on April 16, surpassed its break-even point of 2.5 million viewers on May 5 and—becoming the first film rated “Not Suitable for Minors” to achieve this since 2015’s “The Inside Men”—secured the top spot at the weekly box office for three consecutive weeks, claiming the number-one position among Korean films released in 2025. This is undoubtedly an achievement. Yet, viewed from another angle, it also means that, for an entire quarter, a single mid-budget Korean film—“Yadang”—was effectively the sole pillar sustaining the nation’s theaters.

That void was quickly filled by foreign films. *Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning*, released on May 17, drew 760,000 viewers in its opening weekend—setting the highest 2025 opening—and rapidly dominated multiplex screens. In one week, the market share of Korean films plummeted by 26.4 percentage points from the previous week, while foreign films surged past 70%. During the peak “Family Month,” the biggest film watched by Korean audiences wasn’t a Korean film.

Of course, a counterargument can be made. Kan's invitation in 0 is merely a coincidence of the year, not a death certificate for the industry. Festival line‑ups are dictated by the condition of a few filmmakers and the timing of their submissions, and in fact Park Chan‑wook’s new film wasn’t even entered for Cannes in the first place. To extrapolate a single quarter’s lull into a collapse of the whole structure may be an exaggeration.

Yet this counterargument precisely returns to us the question we ought to be asking: Why, specifically in that quarter, did two entirely distinct metrics—the film festival lineup and the box office—both point to the exact same void? A single coincidence is mere noise, but when the same signal sounds simultaneously in two places, it is no longer coincidence. It means that both the space for artistic ambition and the mid-tier market soil needed to nurture it were vacant.

The event that defined the second quarter of 2025 was neither a box‑office disaster nor the downfall of a particular blockbuster. It was ‘nothing’. A Korean feature film absent from Cannes’ lineup, the second opposition party that was supposed to safeguard theaters in May, and the missing link that should have connected the two. Not a year of abundance nor of hardship, but the result of a spring that sowed too few seeds, compressed into a single quarter.

The essence of the crisis lies not in audiences walking away—but in the inability to conceive “an adventurous, mid-budget film” that could lure them back. A paradox in which the safest choice becomes the riskiest strategy. For Korean cinema to reclaim both the Cannes lineup next spring and May’s theaters, it must ultimately begin by refilling that vacant middle tier. The second quarter was the period when that bill arrived.