This thriller starring Shin Min-a opened soft. Now it's outdrawing 'Toy Story 5' in Korea

When “The Eyes” opened on June 24, almost nobody was betting on it.

Homegrown thrillers have had a rough few years at the box office, and director Yeom Ji-ho’s remake of the 2010 Spanish chiller “Julia’s Eyes” looked like more of the same: A mid-budget genre picture destined to slip out of theaters and onto streaming within weeks.

The one real draw was Shin Min-a, in a dual role as twins — a ceramic artist who dies under murky circumstances and a photographer who investigates the death as her own eyesight fails. But for all her television hits, Shin has never quite broken through in film.

The debut did little to change minds. The first weekend brought a decent but unspectacular 232,947 admissions, and early reactions were mixed, with many finding the story predictable.

Then the numbers turned. Second-weekend attendance jumped 54.5 percent to 359,843, second only to “Toy Story 5,” which opened a week earlier. Weekday ticket sales have been surprisingly solid, with the film outselling the Pixar sequel on every one of them so far in July.

On Thursday, its 16th day in theaters, “The Eyes” topped 1 million admissions, according to the Korean Film Council’s box office tracker — good for No. 2 on the daily chart behind Disney’s live-action “Moana,” which bowed a day earlier.

That makes it the sixth Korean film to reach the mark this year, and the second homegrown horror title, after April’s breakout “Salmokji,” a reservoir-set ghost chiller that defied expectations on its way to more than 3.2 million admissions.

Breaking even is another matter — “The Eyes” reportedly needs about 1.8 million admissions to recoup its budget in theaters — but the target no longer looks far-fetched. Just this Wednesday, the government began handing out a second round of discount coupons, 2.05 million vouchers each worth 6,000 won ($3.90) off a ticket, a move expected to give summer moviegoing another lift.

The first batch, released in May, drove weekly box office revenue up nearly 48 percent, according to the Culture Ministry.

Behind the surge, by most accounts, is social media, where younger viewers in their teens and 20s are leading the conversation. Posts and short-form clips teasing the film’s twist, many under clickbait-style headlines, have flooded social feeds.

That hype was building even before release, when audiences at advance screenings were asked to sign agreements promising not to reveal the ending — a stunt the marketing quickly folded into its pitch.

As it happens, that kind of push is familiar terrain for distributor By4M Studio, known in the industry for social media-savvy campaigns aimed at young users. Founded in 2017 as a digital ad agency, the company branched into publishing, music and beauty before moving into film distribution in 2022.

Its titles have made a habit of building past opening week on the strength of word of mouth and online chatter. The long-shelved tearjerker “The Firefighters” (2024) picked up steam in its second week on the way to 3.8 million admissions, the comedy sequel “Hitman 2” (2025) followed a similar arc to 2.5 million, and the A24 horror import “Backrooms” rode a viral campaign past 1 million this spring.

Nowhere was the pattern clearer than with “Noise.” The roughly $2.5 million horror film, about a woman searching for her missing sister in an apartment complex plagued by unexplained noise, opened June 25 last year against “F1: The Movie” and “Jurassic World Rebirth,” and drew barely 200,000 tickets through its first weekend.

From there, weekday attendance climbed for three straight weeks. The film hit its break-even point on day 18 and finished its run at 1.7 million.

For “The Eyes,” though, time is short. Na Hong-jin’s alien epic “Hope” — the director’s first film since “The Wailing” (2016), and reportedly the most expensive Korean production to date — lands July 15 off a Cannes competition premiere and is expected to dominate screens from day one. That leaves the thriller one last weekend to keep the momentum going.