Em xinh tinh kia revolves around Gil Goo (Ahn Bo Hyun) - an unemployed guy who falls in love with Seon Ji (Lim YoonA) - a girl who just rented a house on the lower floor. But their love affair soon takes off when Gil Goo discovers that baker Seon Ji has turned into a demon every night. To keep it a secret, Seon Ji's father asked Gil Goo to work part-time as a security guard at night.
Em xinh tinh kia marks YoonAs reunion with director Lee Sang Geun, after the success of the film Exit (Exit in the air, 2019) - the film attracted more than 9.4 million viewers during its broadcast time. Therefore, before its release, the work was considered a "heavyweight" candidate for the 10 million ticket milestone.
According to Wikitree, the film industry of this country once had high expectations that "Em xinh tinh kia" could reach a similar milestone or even surpass the success of "Lot thoat tren khong". However, the film's revenue when released in theaters was completely opposite.
On the first day of release, Em xinh tinh kia attracted only 48,561 views, ranking 2nd in terms of revenue at the Korean box office. In the following days, the number of audiences continuously recorded a decrease. Up to now (after 10 days of showing), the total number of tickets sold for the film has reached 342,201, much lower than the break-even price of about 1.7 million tickets.
With the current gloomy ticket sales, revenue of more than 3.2 billion won (nearly 62 billion VND), the possibility that "Em tinh hoa co" can reclaim capital is unlikely. However, the film can still reduce losses by opting to release on online platforms.
The reason is that the revenue is not very impressive, but the audience's reaction is quite positive. The film scored 8.7 points on Lotte; 7.9 points on Lotte Cinema; 7.07 points on Naver. On CGV, the film achieved a CGV Golden Egg (a measure of audience satisfaction) of 87%.
On the other hand, before Em xinh tinh kia, the countrys movies such as Love in the Big City (Kim Go Eun) and Bogota: City of the Lost (Bogota: City of the lost ones/Song Joong Ki) were not successful in theaters but were noticed when released on the online platform Netflix.
With "The Two best students", the film needs 1.3 million views to break even, but only attracts about 879,000 audiences to the cinema to watch the film. The online release has helped to reduce the work's previous revenue failures.
While Bogota: City of the Lost - a film shot mainly in Colombia, was produced with a budget of 12.5 billion won (US$8.6 million) and needed to surpass the 3 million view mark to break even. But since its release on December 31, 2024 in Korea, the film has only attracted 422,000 audiences.
However, as soon as it was released on Netflix in early February this year, the film took the No. 1 spot on the ranking of the most popular non-English-language films of the week on Netflix globally. Even Bogota: City of the Lost ranked 2nd in terms of views on the overall ranking of non-English-speaking and non-English-language films released on Netflix, behind only the American comedy Kinda Pregnant.
