Korea’s Finecut Boards Gangster Action-Comedy ‘Boss’ Ahead Of Filmart

Alan Titchmarsh’s Garden Secrets has hit the headlines after an item of the gardener’s clothing was blurred.Central TV, a state-owned television service, aired a 2010 episode the BBC show on Monday (March 25). In the episode, Titchmarsh, now 74, can be seen pottering about the gardens of Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, providing information, horticultural advice and relaxed viewing.The episode features North Korean narration over the top of Titchmarsh’s calm commentary, but there’s another edit to the clip which surprised some viewers.Titchmarsh’s jeans, which can be seen in clips of him kneeling down and attending to some plants, have been blurred.

Leaders at the University of Bolton are pressing ahead with controversial plans to remove the town from its name. The organisation’s Office for Students (OfS) has launched a consultation on a proposal to change its name to the University of Greater Manchester.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Locally-produced horror-drama “Exhuma” held on to top spot at the South Korea cinema box office for a fifth consecutive weekend. Its complete dominance of the market kept “Exhuma” comfortably ahead of the holdover “Dune 2” and a couple of lower-powered new releases and allowed its running total to surpass 10 million ticket sales. That is the conventional measure of a blockbuster in Korea, a country with a population of roughly 50 million. Over the latest weekend “Exhuma” sold 618,000 tickets for a gross revenue of $4.56 million and a market share of 56%, according to data from Kobis, the database operated by the Korean Film Council (Kofic). The latest increment gives the film a total of $73.4 million earned from 10.2 million admissions.

(G)I-DLE vocalist Yuqi will make her official Korean solo debut in April, her agency CUBE Entertainment has announced.CUBE Entertainment announced Yuqi’s upcoming solo debut today (March 22) in a statement to South Korean news outlet XSports News. “Yuqi plans to release a solo single in April and promote it on music broadcasts,” the label shared, per Soompi.Information about the (G)I-DLE member’s upcoming solo debut, including the release’s format, tracklist and more, is expected in the coming weeks.

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount has pre-emptively acquired John Swetnam’s action-comedy feature spec script, Ballistic.

Last year, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt were part of the theatrical juggernaut event known as Barbenheimer (the organic viral marketing push for “Barbie” and Best Picture winner “Oppenheimer” last summer). Their films opened on the same day, but instead of canceling each other out because there was a push to see the two films, they both turned both into massive box officer earners.

Netflix unveiled the trailer for upcoming Korean sci-fi series Parasyte: The Grey today.

Exhuma (Korean title: Pa-myo) has taken $67.8 million at the Korean box office, having notched more than 9.3 million admissions.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The South Korean box office had a familiar look. Dark drama, “Exhuma” dominated the chart with a more than 50% market share for the fourth weekend in a row. And, for the third successive weekend, “Dune 2” placed second. “Exhuma,” about two shaman, a feng shui master and a mortician who attempt to reverse the mysterious events happening to a U.S.-based Korean family, earned $5.80 million between Friday and Sunday.

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent Animation co-productions between Japanese media companies and their Asian counterparts were once few and far between, but in the past decade, with the rapid rise of animation industries in China and South Korea, the pace has picked up. Indeed, FilMart is playing host to an animation panel March 13 that explored the advantages of cross-border collaboration.

One of the world’s biggest news agencies has claimed that Kensington Palace is no longer a “trusted source” after the furor over Kate Middleton‘s doctored Mother’s Day image.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief South Korean cinema-goers will get a three-day jump on the rest of the world when the Bong Joon-ho-directed “Mickey 17” releases in January 2025 in time for the Lunar New Year holidays. Warner Bros. Pictures says that the Robert Pattinson-starring sci-fi film will open in Korea on Tuesday, Jan.

Bong Joon-Ho‘s next big movie post his Parasite Oscar winner, Mickey 17, will open in his native South Korea homeland on Jan. 28, 2025, three days before the pic’s global launch on Jan. 31.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Pleasant Outcast,” a 10-part Korean series that is set to appear at Canneseries next month, is a companion piece to “Concrete Utopia,” the hit film from last year that was selected as South Korea’s Oscar contender. Both the Lotte Cultureworks series and “Concrete Utopia,” a dystopian drama-thriller set in a post-apocalyptic Seoul, are adapted from best-selling webtoon “Cheerful Outcast,” by Kim Soong Nyung. The film was frequently compared to William Golding’s seminal novel from the 1954 “Lord of the Flies” and its 1964 film adaptation. Using the first part of the webtoon, the series follows Dong-hyun, a high school junior, who barely survives his day-to-day bullying at school.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Enter the Dragon,” starring Bruce Lee, is one of the four or five greatest action films ever made. Yet it has a thin, awkward, lurching story.

Naman Ramachandran Korean action drama “A Shop For Killers” has become the most viewed local original on Disney+ in the Asia Pacific region (Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Philippines) so far in 2024, the streamer has revealed. Set in contemporary Korea, the eight-part series follows college student Jeong Jian who dives for cover in her childhood home after a series of highly skilled assassins come after her.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Leading South Korean sales company Finecut has picked up international sales rights to action comedy film “Boss.” It will launch the title at next week’s FilMart in Hong Kong. Directed by Ra Hee-chan (“Going by the Book,” “Mr. Idol”), the film follows gang members embroiled in fierce competition.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Dune 2” added $2.63 million in its second weekend in South Korea, but the sci-fi fantasy remained a long may short of the year’s runaway winner, “Exhuma,” which has dominated and dynamized box office for three weeks. “Exhuma,” about two shaman, a feng shui master and a mortician who attempt to undo the mysterious events happening to a U.S.-based Korean family, earned $6.52 million between Friday and Sunday, representing a 67% share of the overall box office market, according to data from tracking service Kobis, operated by the Korean Film Council (Kofic). It was the third weekend in a row that “Exhuma” took two-thirds of Korean box office weekend total. After nearly three weeks on release the film has earned a powerful $58.7 million from eight million admissions.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief EST N8, the film and TV sales venture formed by U.S.-based EST and Thailand’s N8 company, has hired Chatsuree ‘Chat’ Sripamorn for an Asian sales roles. Reporting to Tenten Wei, she will represent the company at next week’s FilMart. Sripamorn has previously worked at three of the top Thai entertainment companies Mono Next, GMM Studios and Rose Studio over a span of ten years.

EXCLUSIVE: At 94 years old, June Squibb may not be the most conventional of action heroes. But by gum, she’s the one we need. The Nebraska Oscar nominee is poised to save the summer with Thelma, the nonagenarian action comedy marking the first feature of writer-director Josh Margolin, which Magnolia Pictures has set for a wide release in North America on June 21.