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For foreign viewers, Korean cinema may first invoke images of dark, transgressive thrillers but for local audiences, the industry has always been driven, first and foremost, by melodrama. It wasn’t that long ago that romantic dramas found their way to the very top of the year-end box office charts but these days, even with major stars, the same films are lucky if they can crack the top three during a slow weekend.

This fall from grace has been a long time coming but the first few months of 2016 have proven particularly distressing as a series of star-driven projects stumbled straight out of the gate, almost forgotten by the close of their opening weekends. These have included Remember you, with JUNG Woo-sung and KIM Ha-neul, director LEE Yoon-ki’s return A Man and A Woman with JEON Do-yeon and GONG Yoo, Mood of the Day with YOO Yeon-seok and MOON Chae-won and the unfortunately named UNFORGETTABLE with DOH Kyung-soo (aka D.O. of K-pop boyband EXO). 

Collectively, the films were seen by 1.32 million viewers, less than the opening weekend of many recent hit films. By contrast, the last major hit melodrama, Architecture 101, scored 4.11 million admissions in 2012.

So what happened in the last four years? No one element has orchestrated the decline of Korea’s genre staple but looking at the changing viewing habits of viewers, advances in technology and how major studios have tried to reformulate the use of melodrama in their films offer some clues as to why the genre has struggled so much in recent memory.

Without exploring the whole history of melodrama on the peninsula, we can look back at the late 1990s, when the local industry was about to blow up, and we can see that the biggest domestic titles of each year were generally romantic dramas. Hits at the time included The Letter and The Contact (the top two domestic titles of 1997), A Promise, Christmas in August and Art Museum By The Zoo (numbers one, three and five in 1998). These normally paired popular young stars, were familiar, digestible, and, above all, cheap, at a time when the average budget of a Korean film was a fraction of what it has since become.

In subsequent years, melodramas remained a massive draw while no longer being the main driver of the industry as more varied genre films gripped the industry, which in the millennium quickly improved its technical sophistication. As audiences have grown accustomed both to major spectacle in the multiplex and consuming an increasing amount of content on phones and tablets, the popularity of melodramas in cinema has steadily waned.

Yet, it remains the top source of television content. Melodrama is so deeply intertwined with the TV realm in Korea that fiction programs have always been referred to as ‘dramas’ rather than TV shows. And while audiences have retained an enormous appetite for melodrama on TV, these same spectators are now perhaps unwilling to make a trek to a theater and spend top dollar for something they’re used to getting for free at home or, increasingly, on the move with their portable screens.

Beyond that, it could also be a question of theme and content and what audiences are looking to get out of their trips to the cinema. The main draw that theaters offer is big screen spectacle, though smaller pictures that qualify as events have also broken out, a testament to the influence of social media and trends in a hyper-connected country.

As opposed to melodrama in the West, the Korean variant is focused on the concept of suffering, which is at odds with the view of the cinematic experience as primarily a form of escapism. Korean viewers have frequently favored content that embraces difficult themes, often narratives that reflect back to them some of the darker episodes of local history or realities of contemporary society.

Yet, as a new generation of filmgoers grows up, we may be seeing a slide in general audiences’ willingness to spend their money and time on products that may not comfortably embrace the label of big screen entertainment. Melodrama isn’t a mode primarily associated with dark stories, yet melodramatic films tend to be more somber than their frothier and more easily digestible TV counterparts.

Things have gotten more polished since then, with less clearly defined fourth acts, but melodrama is still concentrated in the final moments of a film and thus retains pride of place as the sendoff for audiences to be able to reach emotional catharsis.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario where Korean cinema would simply stop making melodramatic titles, and there are plenty of films that currently in various stages of development, yet some evidence has emerged that content producers have become less confident in the prospects of properties that primarily engage with melodramatic tropes.

Take JEON Do-yeon for example, one of the country’s top actresses and the doyen of melodrama, who got her start with the classic romantic dramas A Promise, The Contact and The Harmonium In My Memory (1999). Just as A Man and A Woman was about to be released, when it was already clear that the film was destined for a small audience, JEON signed on for a Korea version of the hit US TV show The Good Wife. The drama is her first TV role in a decade and will surely find a large audience there, the same group of viewers who gravitate towards melodrama but no longer seek it out in theaters.

Romantic drama production may subside in the coming years but given the low cost associated with the genre and its lengthy history in the local market, what we will likely see more of are more and more tweaked melodramas that seek to add something to the pot. 

Looking at the films on the way this April, we already have LOVE, LIES, a romantic title with a period drama sheen and patriotic overtone through its Japanese Colonial Era setting, and Time Renegades, a split timeline romantic thriller that echoes films such as Ditto (2000) and Il Mare (2000). Both films are made by romantic drama veterans who haven’t experienced success in over a decade: PARK Heung-sik (I Wish I Had a Wife, 2001; My Mother, The Mermaid, 2004) and KWAK Jae-yong (My Sassy Girl, 2001; The Classic, 2003).

Then again, the Korean film industry has always been unpredictable, and any kind of film can break out given the right set of circumstances.