KOBIS (영화관입장권통합전산망, the Korean Box-office Information System) is run by the Korean Film Council (KOFIC, 영화진흥위원회). It collects ticketing data from cinemas across the country in real time and publishes box-office charts and industry statistics, with the stated aim of making the way Korean films are distributed more transparent.2
KOFIC took the project over from the culture ministry in 2001 and built the system in 2003. Cinemas joined voluntarily at first, encouraged by a transmission subsidy and an exemption from having to report each screening to their local council, and KOBIS says it now covers 99% of screens at computerised cinemas.3
The law
Why every cinema has to report
Joining was voluntary until 2010, so KOFIC had no legal way to act when a cinema was thought to send incomplete or inaccurate data. An amendment to the Motion Pictures and Video Products Act, passed by the National Assembly in February 2010 and promulgated on March 17, 2010, made it compulsory; it took effect on September 17, 2010.3
Article 39 of the act now says KOFIC must run the system, every cinema operator must join it, and members must send their admissions and ticket sales "without deliberate omission or manipulation". A cinema that has joined no longer has to report its screenings to the local council itself; KOFIC passes the details on.3 A rebuilt system went live on January 5, 2012.3
The data
What a cinema sends, and when
Each ticket is a record. As it is sold, the cinema's ticketing provider sends a line with the cinema, screen, showing, film code, ticket number, price, seat and any discount. The four cinema-chain operators (CJ Olive Networks, Lotte Cinema, Megabox and Cine Q) and eight certified ticketing agencies do the sending, over their own VPN links.4
On top of that comes a daily summary per showing (tickets sold and cancelled, and their value) by 07:00 the next morning, the cinemas' schedules every three hours, and a monthly closing file by the 5th of the following month.4 Every film carries a standard KOFIC code, the FIMS code, so that tickets from different chains add up to the same title.2
The chart
Ranked by admissions, not money
KOBIS's weekend chart lists each film's gross (매출액), its share of all gross, its admissions (관객수), screens and screenings, and it is ordered by admissions.1 On October 2–4, 2026, that put The Assassin(s) (암살자(들)) first with 412,004 admissions and ₩4.07 billion, ahead of Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island, which sold 405,966 tickets but took more: ₩4.32 billion, a 25.3% share of the weekend's gross against 23.9%.1
The next weekend, October 9–11, Chiikawa led on both counts, with 407,893 admissions to The Assassin(s)' 407,680.5 DabPop's own film rankings, such as the highest-grossing Korean films, follow the same convention and rank by admissions.
Price
Why gross and admissions diverge
Gross divided by admissions gives the average price paid, a DabPop calculation from KOBIS's figures. Over October 2–4 it ranged from about ₩8,950 a ticket for the Chinese animation Sheriff Labrador to about ₩35,000 for ENHYPEN VR CONCERT : DESTINY, a 52-minute ENHYPEN concert film shown on two screens, which ranked 15th by admissions with 2,549 tickets but took ₩89.2 million.16
Prices vary by showing: KOBIS lists each film's screening types, such as 2D, 4D and IMAX, and every ticket record carries its price and any discount.46 Differences in the average price are how a film with fewer admissions can still take more money, as Chiikawa (about ₩10,630 a ticket) did against The Assassin(s) (about ₩9,890).1
Shares
Screens, screenings and seats
KOBIS also publishes shares, with fixed formulas. Screen share is the number of screens allotted to a film divided by all screens operating that day; screening share does the same with the number of showings. Seat share is the seats allotted to a film over all seats that day, and seat sales rate is admissions over the seats allotted.7
Booking rate (예매율) for a film already on release counts advance bookings for showings from two hours after the time of the query; for a film not yet released, it counts bookings for showings from its release date.7
Corrections
Live figures and official totals
KOBIS figures can move. Tickets sometimes fail to arrive in real time, because of transmission gaps between a cinema and its provider or a film-code mapping error, and the provider sends corrections the next day, which are then added to the statistics. That is one reason a distributor's own count may differ from KOBIS's on the day.7
KOFIC's official figures are the per-film records in its annual Korean Film Yearbook (한국영화연감), which are final and don't change; live KOBIS totals are aggregated from ticket data and can vary with how they are queried.7