Yeon Sang-ho's 'Gunche' hits 5 million admissions in 24 days, Jeon Ji-hyun marks screen return

Gunche hit 5 million admissions on the morning of June 13 — 24 days after its May 21 opening. The count stood at 5,097,853 as of that date.

It held the box office top spot that day, adding 132,016 viewers in a single day. Wang-gwa Saneun Namja crossed 5 million first among 2026 releases, but took 18 days to get there. Gunche did it two days faster than Zombie Daughter, last year's highest-grossing Korean film. The speed of each milestone tells the real story: day 4 for 1 million, day 5 for 2 million, day 10 for 3 million, day 14 for 4 million. Each one set a 2026 record. By week four, weekday daily admissions had settled to around 50,000. Industry observers are already floating 7 million, and some are cautiously raising the possibility of 10 million.

Director Yeon Sang-ho wrote and directed the film. He built the K-zombie template with Train to Busan and Peninsula. Gunche is set inside a sealed high-rise shopping mall in downtown Seoul where survivors face infected individuals that evolve in unpredictable forms during an unidentified outbreak. Runtime is 122 minutes.

Jeon Ji-hyun leads the cast as biomedical scientist Kwon Se-jeong. It's her first screen role in 11 years, following Assassination in 2015 and The Thieves in 2012, which together drew 20 million admissions. Koo Kyo-hwan plays a villain in possession of a vaccine. Ji Chang-wook, Shin Hyun-been, Kim Shin-rok, and Ko Soo round out the ensemble.

Wow Point and Smilegate produced the film, with Midnight Studio as co-producer, and Showbox distributed it. It screened in the Midnight Screening section of the 79th Cannes International Film Festival. Critic Kim Hyo-jeong called it "a film full of solid spectacle and discourse warning of the dangers of technocracy."

Yeon Sang-ho is scheduled to appear on KBS News 12 on June 16.