'Masquerade' Is 7th Movie in History to Break 10,000,000 Viewers

'Masquerade' became the seventh movie in history to break 10 million viewers and it is the second one this year after "Thieves."

Everytime a 10 million viewer movie appears, people showered it with compliments and complaints. When "The Host" set the record for the most successful Korean movie of all time in 2006, many people both praised it for its achievement and debunked it for having dominated screens for so long.

"Thieves" has drawn over 13 million viewers at this point and re-writing history but people continued to criticize it for its screen domination. Kim Ki Duk openly criticized it at one point, saying that it dominated screens in order to become successful. 

Now "Masquerade" is also drawing the same kind of attention. 

"Masquerade" was welcomed by many who hadn't seen a good new movie since the release of "The Thieves" and it managed to become incredibly successful during September and October, a time that's known to be a less populated season for movies. 

"Masquerade" drew over 5 million viewers in just the month of September alone and drew half of the moviegoers in all of September. It not only provided more life to the industry but also allowed more growth in it as well. 

The new record is also a sign of how the Korean film market is prospering at this time. This is the first time since 2006 that two movies in one year have broken this 10 million viewer record and this is a great sign despite the fact that the economy is currently in recession. 

Another issue that people often talk about is how "Masquerade" changed its date from Chuseok to September 13th due to Lee Byung Hun's schedule filming "RED 2" in Montreal. Because his shooting schedule changed, he had to change all the promotion around it and therefore, the movie had to be postponed a little bit. 

People criticized it for dominating the screens and creating free ticket events in an attempt to get it to the 10 million viewers but a CJ E&M executive said, "The ticket event was something that CGV, the theater chain, created and we got the data but it was only a 0.1% of the daily viewers that the movie was drawing."

However, one must consider that just because a corporation wants it to, a movie will not necessarily always reach 10 million (see: R2B).