천만영화 스토리 디자인 연구

Ten Million Club: A Study of Story Design in Korean Mega Blockbusters

attract over 10 million moviegoers to the theaters in South Korea. This was an astounding milestone in Korean box office history that led to a new era of so called “Ten Million Club”– an exclusive group of mega blockbusters. Since then, a total of 18 films joined the “Club” in 13 years, 14 Korean films among them. This study analyzes key success factors of five carefully selected Korean mega blockbusters in the Ten Million Club: Masquerade (2012), Miracle in Cell No. 7 (2012), The Attorney (2013), Roaring Currents (2014), and Ode to My Father (2014). Commercial films must deliver the following core emotions in its storytelling: empathy, authenticity, and catharsis. The Ten Million Club films analyzed in this study successfully deliver these three core emotions, and certain storytelling elements in the selected films make up the key success factors. In conclusion, this analysis found five common storytelling elements emerging from Korean mega blockbusters in the Ten Million Club: single protagonist, character-centric story, multiple levels of conflicts, thematic unity, and application of a familiar genre. These five elements are at the core of Korean films, whose primary objective in storytelling is communication with the audience.