Han So-Hee and Choi Min Sik's The Intern becomes first Korean film to top box office in 50 days, beats Odyssey

Kim Do Young's remake of The Intern has taken over the whole office, folks.

According to the Korean Film Council's tracking data, as quoted by AllKPop, the film pulled in 61,038 admissions on its September 16 opening day alone, pushing cumulative attendance (advance sales included) to 82,566. Modest numbers on paper, but enough to knock out the reigning heavyweight.

The heavyweight being Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, which had been running the Korean box office for 43 straight days since dropping on August 5. Nobody unseats a 43-day streak by accident.

Even better for local cinema: this is the first time in 50 days a Korean film has reclaimed the top spot, following a stretch where homegrown titles kept getting shouldered out by international blockbusters — a run that started right after Na Hong Jin's Hope had its moment.

Ki Ho, a man armed with 37 years of hard-won career experience, starts from scratch as an intern at a fashion company run by Sun Woo — a CEO who built an empire in just three years and probably doesn't have time for anyone's onboarding small talk.

If that setup sounds familiar, it's because it is: this is the Korean remake of Nancy Meyers' 2015 crowd-pleaser The Intern, which paired Robert De Niro's Ben Whittaker with Anne Hathaway's whirlwind founder Jules Ostin. The new version hands those roles to Choi Min Sik (as Ki Ho) and Han So Hee (as Sun Woo), an age-and-rank mismatch that's clearly translatable across continents.

But this isn't a scene-for-scene copy-paste job. Director Kim Do Young shifts the emotional center of gravity: instead of the story being mostly about an old-school mentor dispensing wisdom, it leans harder into Sun Woo's own reckoning as she juggles company pressure and a personal life that's fraying at the edges. The remake also swaps in distinctly Korean office DNA, generational friction, workplace politics, the ever-evolving slang of younger staff, and, in a very 2026 touch, works AI's growing presence in the workplace into the plot, something the 2015 original never had to contend with.

Kim Do Young, previously behind Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 and Once We Were Us, directs. Kim Jun Han, Ryu Hye Young, and Kim Geum Soon round out the cast.

For context: the original The Intern was a genuine global hit, grossing roughly $194 million worldwide on a $35 million budget, with over 3.6 million admissions in South Korea alone — so this remake had big (comfortable, sensible) shoes to fill.

Runtime-wise, the Korean version stretches to 132 minutes, eleven minutes longer than the original's 121, giving the story a bit more elbow room to develop its characters and conflicts. It's rated 12+.