The Odyssey Hit 10 Million Admissions in Korea and Became the 35th Film to Do It

On the afternoon of Sunday 6 September, on the thirty-third day of its release, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey crossed ten million admissions in South Korea. The Korean Film Council's tracking system logged it, the Korean press reported it, and the English-language aggregation that followed described it as a record.

It is the thirty-fifth film to do this. It is the tenth foreign film to do it. It is the second film of 2026 to do it, and it is not even the biggest film of 2026 in Korea.

The club, and who is in it

Ten million admissions in a country of fifty-two million is the benchmark Korean box office runs on, and the list is long enough to have its own taxonomy. Before The Odyssey, thirty-four films had managed it: twenty-five Korean, nine foreign. The arithmetic lands exactly.

The ten foreign members, by admissions:

• Avengers: Endgame — 13,977,602 (2019)
• Frozen 2 — 13,747,792 (2019)
• Avatar — 13,351,368 (2009)
• Aladdin — 12,723,777 (2019)
• Avengers: Infinity War — 11,233,176 (2018)
• Avatar: The Way of Water — 10,804,938 (2022)
• Avengers: Age of Ultron — 10,504,007 (2015)
• Interstellar — 10,326,240 (2014)
• Frozen — 10,303,508
• The Odyssey — just over ten million, and counting

One film gets left out of almost every version of this list and does not belong in it: Bohemian Rhapsody finished on 9,948,386. It came within fifty-two thousand admissions and never crossed. The tenth member is Frozen.

The all-time Korean record belongs to The Admiral: Roaring Currents at 17,616,661, set in 2014 and unthreatened. Second place is a 2026 domestic film, The King's Warden, on 16,918,111 — and that is the film that got to ten million first this year. The Odyssey was second.

The record it did set

Korea's IMAX record, and it is not close. As of Saturday 5 September, The Odyssey had drawn more than 1.1 million IMAX admissions in the country, passing Avatar: The Way of Water at roughly 929,000. A film shot substantially on IMAX film stock, playing in a market with a dense IMAX footprint, taking the format record by nearly twenty percent — that is the story, and it is a better one than a milestone thirty-four other films have reached.

It also set the fastest pace of any 2026 release there: one million on day four, five million on day thirteen, eight million on day twenty-four.

And it is the second Nolan film in the club, after Interstellar in 2014 — a film whose Korean performance has been a running curiosity for a decade, and which sits two places above The Odyssey on the foreign list.

The stat that is genuinely unusual, if it survives the week

The Korea Herald put the interesting version on the record before the milestone landed: if Spider-Man: Brand New Day also crosses ten million, it would be the first time since 2015 that two back-to-back releases both did it — and the first time ever that both were Hollywood imports. The previous pairs were domestic: Silmido and Taegukgi in 2003 and 2004, Assassination and Veteran in 2015.

Spider-Man was at 7.74 million when that piece ran. Whether it gets there is not yet settled.

Numbers to be careful with

• The exact cumulative figure of 10,027,970 admissions and around $83.2 million comes from a single outlet. The Korean papers reported only that it had passed ten million. "Just over ten million" is the safe form.
• The number of consecutive weekends at number one is reported as five in one place and six in another. Neither is confirmed.
• Some syndications date the crossing to 7 September. The Korean reports say the thirty-third day after a 5 August opening, which is Sunday the sixth.
• "First Hollywood film since Endgame" is simply false. Frozen 2 came after it in the same year, and The Way of Water three years later.

Thirty-fifth is still very good

There is a version of this story that does not need a record at all. A three-hour Homer adaptation, in a foreign language, played to more than one in five South Koreans in a month, held number one through a month of weekends, and set the country's IMAX high-water mark on the way.

Instead it got "record" attached to it, in a market that keeps a public, numbered, government-maintained list of exactly how many films have done the same thing. The list was thirty-four long. It is now thirty-five.