Why Seoul’s biggest Imax screen pulled ‘The Odyssey’ while it was still selling out

A decades-old law known as 'screen quota' requires every screen in Korea to play local films 73 days a year, Imax included

For weeks, Kim Hyun-ah had been refreshing the booking page, waiting for a good seat to open up.

The 30-year-old Seoul resident had been hoping since summer to catch Christopher Nolan’s box office sensation “The Odyssey” at CGV Yongsan, the flagship of Korea’s largest multiplex chain and home to Asia’s biggest Imax screen.

Korea has no theater that can show the film in 70mm Imax format as the director intended. The Imax screen at Yongsan offers the closest thing to the original presentation, as the only one in the country capable of displaying the film’s full 1.43:1 frame.

More than two months into the run, the film was still a hot ticket in Imax. Seats in the middle of the row, where you can take in the whole screen at once, kept getting snapped up; only the front three rows were left for peak showtimes last week.

By Wednesday, “The Odyssey” was nowhere to be found in the theater’s Imax listings. In its place was a newly released Korean film Kim had never heard of.

“I’d been waiting all summer to see it in the right seat, and it all came to nothing,” Kim said. “Why pull it completely when there are people still lining up for it?”

The movie that replaced “The Odyssey” was “Paradise Lost,” a psychological thriller from “Train to Busan” director Yeon Sang-ho, fresh off his zombie film “Colony” earlier this year. Made on a shoestring budget of 500 million won ($365,000), it almost everything a blockbuster isn't, with neither the scale nor spectacle that draws audiences to premium formats in the first place.

The numbers suggest Kim was far from the only moviegoer left out after a long wait. Even in its final week, “The Odyssey” was filling around 80 percent of seats in Yongsan’s Imax auditorium, according to CGV. Resale listings for its screenings were turning up on online marketplaces as late as last weekend.

Why drop a film that was still drawing crowds for one not specifically meant for the giant screen? It comes down to a decades-old rule that has long dictated how cinemas here set their schedules.

Under South Korean law, every theater must show Korean films on at least one-fifth of its screening days, or 73 days a year. The measure, known locally as the “screen quota,” was introduced in 1967 to protect the country’s film industry from Hollywood, whose bigger budgets and stars threatened to crowd local productions out of the market. At its peak, the mandatory minimum was 146 days, or two-fifths of the year.

Each time officials moved to scale it back, the local film industry rose up in vehement protest. When the government halved the quota to its current 73 days in 2006 to clear the way for free trade talks with the United States, prominent stars and filmmakers took to the streets in downtown Seoul — among them “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho and his star Song Kang-ho, “Squid Game” actor Lee Byung-hun and “Oldboy” director Park Chan-wook.

Few other countries require their theaters to show homegrown films for a set number of days by law. Spain’s film law reserves a quarter of screenings for European films, but not for Spanish ones specifically. The closest case is China, which mandates that cinemas give at least two-thirds of their screening time to local productions and typically caps the number of foreign releases at about 34 a year.

When Korean films were struggling to find their footing in the 1980s and ’90s, such protection was widely seen as necessary; many credit it with keeping the industry alive until Korean cinema’s boom in the 2000s. But today, with local titles often outselling foreign ones at home and multiplexes offering a growing range of screen formats, the rule has created a different set of problems.

The trouble in this case is that the quota applies to each screen rather than to each theater. That means premium screens such as Imax, 4DX and Dolby Cinema must each, without exception, give 73 days to Korean films, whether or not those films were made for them.

A day counts only if the screen plays Korean films all day. Multiplexes have adapted by timing those days strategically, getting them out of the way during slow stretches so their premium auditoriums are free when major blockbusters come along.

Yongsan’s Imax screen has shown Korean films on only 35 days so far this year. With Hollywood heavyweights “Avengers: Doomsday” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Three” set to open in December, it still needs to fill 38 more days with Korean films before then. That meant the end for “The Odyssey,” no matter the demand.

“When there’s demand for a film and it still can’t be shown because of the screen quota, audiences lose out too,” said a film industry official who requested anonymity. “Counting the quota by theater instead of by screen could be one alternative.”