Culture minister orders Kofic to address alleged box office manipulation

Park Bo-gyoon, minister of culture, sports and tourism, ordered the Korean Film Council (Kofic) to come up with measures to address the alleged box office results manipulation by movie theaters and distributors.

Theatergoers buy tickets at a multiplex in central Seoul on July 2, 2023. [YONHAP]

Park Bo-gyoon, minister of culture, sports and tourism, ordered the Korean Film Council (Kofic) to come up with measures to address the alleged box office results manipulation by movie theaters and distributors after they have been sent to the prosecution for indictment.

Park summoned Park Ki-yong, chair of Kofic, to the Culture Ministry's Seoul office on Friday and told him, "The public's trust in Kofic and the film industry has been lost due to box office data manipulation" and that "Kofic needs to come up with countermeasures and demonstrate leadership to fix the problem," according to the ministry on Sunday.

Kofic operates an integrated computer network for theaters, the basis for box office counting in Korea. On Wednesday, the police said that 69 people from three multiplexes and 24 distributors had been sent to the prosecution on charges of manipulating the number of tickets sold by entering false ticketing information into the network.

The police found the box office data of at least 323 films released in Korea over the past five years was inflated by 2.67 million.

To prevent box office results manipulation and increase transparency in the film industry, the ministry suggested collecting opinions from the industry with Kofic at the center and developing a box office counting standard based on sales instead of the number of audiences.

The ministry added it will consider expanding the scope of penalties for manipulating box office data to include distributors, not only theaters.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]