Kwak Yeon-soo is a digital editor at The Korea Times creating, editing and curating digital content for the newspaper’s website, mobile app and social media. She previously covered a diverse array of cultural, political and business topics.
'Yaksha: Ruthless Operations' lands at No. 3 on Netflix movies
Actor Seol Kyung-gu in a scene from “Yaksha: Ruthless Operations” / Courtesy of Netflix
By Kwak Yeon-soo
By Kwak Yeon-soo
“Yaksha: Ruthless Operations,” a film about Korean spies taking up a dangerous mission in China, has become the third most-viewed film on Netflix worldwide.
It is the first time for a Korean film to be included in the top 3 on the Netflix movie chart, while there have been several dramas to do so, such as “Squid Game” and “All of Us Are Dead.”
According to data by streaming analytics company FilxPatrol, the film starring Seol Kyung-gu and Park Hae-soo placed third on Netflix's global top 10 movie chart as of Monday, three days after its release. The teenage romance film, “The In Between,” topped the ranking of the most watched films on Netflix followed by the Polish action film, “Furioza.”
However, in the Asia region for Netflix's most-streamed movie, “Yaksha” came out on top.
Directed by Na Hyeon, well known for his 2016 crime action film, “The Prison,” “Yaksha” follows the story of Ji-hoon (Park), a prosecutor in the National Intelligence Service who is given a task to inspect the Shenyang branch and the leader of the overseas black ops team, Kang-in (Seol). Digging into Kang-in, Ji-hoon gets dragged into a perilous mission in a Chinese city riddled with spies from the two Koreas, the U.S., Japan and China.
The film was supposed to hit local theaters sooner, but its theatrical release was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It then signed with the global streaming giant and was released as a Netflix original.