When “눈동자” (Pupil), a modestly budgeted Korean thriller, opened in theaters on June 24, 2026, it shared its release date with one of Hollywood’s bigger summer bets: Warner Bros.’ “Supergirl.” Five days later, the comparison isn’t close — and not in the direction the marketing budgets would have predicted. “눈동자” has now held the No. 2 spot on Korea’s overall box office for three straight days, while “Supergirl” has settled into fifth place with what one outlet flatly called a “참담한” — dismal — result.
Per Money Today (IZE) reporter Choi Jae-uk’s June 28 report, which cites Korean Film Council (KOFIC) ticketing data, “눈동자” drew 95,034 admissions on June 27 alone, pushing its four-day cumulative total to 216,307. “Supergirl,” opening on the same day, pulled in just 26,356 admissions that same day for a cumulative total of 92,257 — roughly a 2-to-1 gap after just four days in theaters. Topstarnews reporter Lee Su-hyun’s June 28 report adds that “눈동자” has now spent three consecutive days at No. 2 overall and No. 1 among Korean releases, trailing only the second-weekend juggernaut “Toy Story 5.”
What’s driving it, per Money Today, isn’t a marketing push — it’s word of mouth. The film carries a CGV “egg index” of 88-89%, a Naver audience score of 8.73, and 8.9 and 8.2 on Lotte Cinema and Megabox respectively, scores the outlet frames as fueling a “역주행”: a delayed, audience-driven climb rather than a front-loaded opening-weekend spike that fades. The film casts Shin Min-a in dual roles — a photographer losing her sight to a hereditary optic-nerve disease who investigates the mysterious death of her twin sister, a potter who’d also gone blind — and is being positioned as a counter-programming thriller against a summer slate otherwise dominated by effects-driven tentpoles.
The comparison invites two readings, and they don’t fully agree. One is that this is a small vindication for character-driven local genre filmmaking holding its ground against a franchise machine in its own backyard. The other, more tempered reading is that “Supergirl”‘s struggles say at least as much about that film’s own reception — mixed-to-negative by the same report’s account — as they do about “눈동자”‘s strength, and that a steady, word-of-mouth climb toward roughly 200,000 admissions is a fundamentally different kind of win than the numbers “Toy Story 5” is putting up two weeks into its own run.
Either way, “눈동자” is doing it the slow way: not by outspending a superhero movie, but by outlasting it one positive review at a time. Whether that holds up once the rest of the summer’s bigger releases arrive will say more about the durability of word-of-mouth in Korean theaters than the “Supergirl” comparison alone ever could.
Sources: Choi Jae-uk, “신민아 1인2역 도전 ‘눈동자’, 역주행 흥행 시동거나? [박스오피스],” Money Today (IZE), June 28, 2026. Lee Su-hyun, “신민아X김남희 ‘눈동자’, 박스오피스 2위→20만 돌파…관객 평점→쿠키 유무?,” Topstarnews, June 28, 2026.
