Korea Spent Its Biggest Budget Ever on Hope. Na Hong-jin Made More Money With $8 Million.

Two corrections before anything else, because both are circulating.

Hope is not in TIFF's Midnight Madness. It plays Toronto as a Special Events title. The Midnight Madness slate was announced on 6 August and this is not on it.

And the release date is not contradictory. Neon set Wednesday 9 September. Sources filing it as an "11–13 September" opener are quoting the first weekend frame, which is a different thing. Korea did exactly the same: a Wednesday release on 15 July, first weekend 17–19 July.

The cheapest film he ever made outgrossed the most expensive one

The Wailing cost roughly $8 million and took $48.6 million in South Korea. Hope cost a reported ₩70 billion — about $46 million, pitched as the most expensive Korean production ever mounted — and has taken $35.3 million in South Korea.

Roughly six times the budget for about three-quarters of the domestic gross. Even the openings run the same way round: $13.1 million for The Wailing, $11.4 million for Hope, which took a 66.6% market share on its first weekend and 1,504,019 admissions.

About that budget figure, though. It is real reporting and it is not a confirmed number. It originates in Korean press as ₩70 billion, and the cleanest English instance — the Korea Times, 6 July — attributes it to nobody. Deadline has never stated a budget for the film. Box Office Mojo carries no budget field for it. The closest anyone connected to the production has come is Plus M saying the film had recouped "nearly half" of its net production budget before release — a percentage with no denominator, and a different base from the gross figure.

It made its money before anyone bought a ticket

Hope pre-sold to more than 200 territories before its premiere, an all-time record for a Korean title. Buyers included Focus Features and Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions, for several of whom it was a first Korean acquisition. Mubi took Latin America, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Turkey. Neon bought North America and English-language rights on 10 April, off the back of an early footage presentation the previous November.

Then it opened, and its entire theatrical gross to date sits below its reported budget. The film was de-risked in the sales office and has yet to justify itself in a cinema. The record it actually set was a sales record — and it set that record on the strength of a Cannes premiere that won nothing.

A Korean jury president, the first Korean film in competition in four years, and no prize

Park Chan-wook presided over the Cannes jury this May. Hope was the first South Korean film in the main competition since Park's own Decision to Leave in 2022, and its selection completed a clean sweep: every feature Na has made has now played Cannes — The Chaser in Midnight Screenings in 2008, The Yellow Sea in Un Certain Regard in 2011, The Wailing out of competition in 2016.

It left with nothing. And the Palme d'Or that Park's jury handed out went to Cristian Mungiu's Fjord — also a Neon title. Neon took six films to Cannes and came away with both the winner and the loser.

Four Hollywood stars, buried under the one element critics disliked

The cast list is not padded, whatever you have read. Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton are all in the Cannes credits with character names. The catch is what they are doing there: they play the aliens. The Hollywood Reporter calls them "show-stopping cameos." RogerEbert.com notes their "onscreen look appears to be CGI paint that's still drying," with minimal dialogue until the final stretch.

And the single most-criticised element of the film is exactly that layer. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus praises "awe-inspiring production design" and, in the same sentence, "amusingly quaint visual effects."

A record Korean budget bought four international stars and then painted over them with the thing reviewers liked least. It is also Vikander and Fassbender's first on-screen reunion since The Light Between Oceans in 2016 — a decade apart, reunited, unrecognisable. Meanwhile Hwang Jung-min, the actual lead, spent the shoot performing to nothing at all:

"It was my first time acting without an actual partner in front of me, so I had to rely heavily on my imagination. I had to calculate every movement and expression while looking at monitors to check where my eyes should be focused, since there was nothing physically there."

The numbers, as of today

• Rotten Tomatoes: 74% from 65 critics. No audience score yet — fewer than 50 verified ratings, so anything you see quoted as one is invented.
• Metacritic: 68 from 25 critics, 18 positive / 6 mixed / 2 negative.
• The Wailing, for comparison: 99% from 87 critics, Metacritic 81.
• Korea: $11.4M opening, $35.3M cumulative. US: opens tomorrow.
• Runtime: 160 minutes at Cannes, recut to 156 minutes 25 seconds for Korea.

One genuinely open question: nobody has said which cut Neon is releasing. Na confirmed the shorter version for Korea — five minutes out, three to four minutes of new material in — but Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and Box Office Mojo all still list the US version at 2h40, the Cannes length. Either the listings are stale or American audiences are getting the longer film.

Aggregate scores are also moving daily, which is worth noting when the numbers matter as much as they do to a film like this — the same problem that makes "best-reviewed in a decade" claims collapse under inspection.

What it actually is

Hwang Jung-min plays Ko Bum-seok, chief of a police outpost at a place called Hope Harbor. Zo In-sung is a local hunter; Hoyeon is a rookie officer. Something arrives. Na wrote and directed; Hong Kyung-pyo — who shot The Wailing and Parasite — is behind the camera; Michael Abels, of Get Out and Nope, wrote the score.

Shot in South Jeolla province and in Romania's Retezat Mountains, including a forest horseback sequence in natural daylight that Zo trained three months for. Na's stated aim was less violence than his previous work, not more:

"I wanted to make a film with a much lower level of violence than my previous works. Although guns can be perceived as much more brutal weapons, I realized they could actually be used to express the story effectively without being overly graphic."

Pete Hammond's line out of Cannes is the one the marketing will use: a film that "out-Hollywoods anything of its kind made by Hollywood." Whether Americans agree, on a Wednesday in September, is the actual question.