“Avatar: Fire and Ash” tightened its grip on South Korea’s holiday box office, selling 1.05 million tickets and earning about $8.6 million from Dec. 26–28, according to the Korean Film Council’s tracking service. The sequel has now reached $32.6 million and 4.04 million admissions since opening on Dec. 17, giving multiplexes a year-end anchor built for premium screens.
Disney’s “Zootopia 2” held second place, adding roughly $3.0 million for the weekend and lifting its local total to about $50.3 million on 7.48 million admissions. Together, the two films accounted for roughly four-fifths of weekend revenue, a concentration that underlines how heavily Korean theaters have leaned on global franchises and animation through the Christmas corridor.
Daily grosses show how sharply demand spiked around the holiday: “Avatar: Fire and Ash” pulled in about $3.4 million on Dec. 27 alone, playing on about 2,000 screens and taking close to 60% of the day’s revenue. Local titles struggled to break through that wall of screens; the Korean romance “오늘 밤, 세계에서 이 사랑이 사라진다 해도” landed third for the weekend with about $1.25 million.
That pattern matches the shape of Korea’s 2025 theatrical year. KOFIC’s annual rankings show “Zootopia 2” as the year’s top title, followed by Japan’s “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba Infinity Castle Arc,” with “Avatar: Fire and Ash” already sitting fifth after less than two weeks in release. One Korean film—“My Daughter is a Zombie”—made the top five. Pop culture critic Jung Duk-hyun argued that films survive when they give audiences “a real reason to go to the theater,” while culture critic Kim Sung-soo said foreign films and animation “sold about as well as they always have,” but stood out because fewer domestic films reached theaters.
Korea’s total moviegoing in 2025 sat just above 103 million admissions as of late December, down from more than 123 million a year earlier, and no film crossed the 10 million-admission mark—a benchmark long treated as the line for true national hits.
