I Turned a 6-Million Movie Into a 10-Million Hit
My first time acting wasn't nearly as hard as I'd expected.
I'd figured immersing myself would be a struggle. Instead, I slipped into the character of Lee Ha-neul so completely it was as if I'd been born in her skin.
This is the best I can do with what I've got right now.
I wrung every last drop of performance I could from a B-minus acting stat and put it on camera.
While I was still turning that over in my head, a shout cut through the set.
"Cut!"
Director Hong Jun-seok, the man behind Daegu-haeng.
"Honestly, I didn't think you'd be this good. I was braced to reshoot this a few times."
He looked at Lee Yena and Park Ha-jun the way a man looks at precious gems. And he had every reason to. Even veteran adult actors tensed up in front of a camera, and that kind of nerves almost always spilled into mistakes — which meant retake after retake was just part of the job. Even if nobody flubbed a line, a performance that didn't sit right with the director still had to be done over.
By that measure, Lee Yena and Park Ha-jun had cleared both bars. They hadn't frozen up or fumbled in front of the lens, and they hadn't turned in anything the director could find fault with.
"So…?"
"That's a wrap on this scene. Let's move on to the next one."
A cheer erupted across the set. Not from me or Ha-jun — from the crew.
Why are they cheering?
Yeah, what's that about?
We still hadn't figured it out by the time we had to get back in front of the camera for the next scene.
"Alright — ready, GO!"
The second performance started, and the answer was forced on us whether we wanted it or not. We finally understood why the crew had been shouting.
This director. Hong Jun-seok.
If the quality dipped even a fraction, he called for a reshoot. No exceptions.
Ah.
Truthfully, that first take had felt like I'd dragged out every ounce of ability I currently possessed. There was no way I could keep serving up that same level take after take. What I'd just done was the ceiling of what I could show right now.
Hong Jun-seok, however, seemed to have decided that ceiling was the default. Anything that fell short of that first performance got an immediate "again," and it took seventeen failures before we finally locked the second scene.
We still pulled it off, though…
Yes!
Ha-jun and I were still riding that little high when the director spoke up again.
"Alright. Let's shoot the next scene!"
"Ah."
Right. I had five scenes on the call sheet today. We weren't even halfway.
Two scenes had already eaten three hours. By the time we finished everything, it would probably be evening.
"Uh. Hang in there…?"
"Yeah…."
Ha-jun's part for the day was done — he didn't have much screen time. Which meant, of course, that the only person left to get put through the wringer for the rest of the afternoon was me.
Well. I signed up for this…
I'd chosen acting. I was going to see it through and give it everything I had. Even if I dropped.
"That's a wrap!"
Hong Jun-seok's voice rang out, and everyone on set became a single organism — clapping, cheering, shouting themselves hoarse.
"Wooooooo!"
I was right there in the middle of it, obviously.
I left everything I had on that floor…
Nine hours, all told. Five scenes. Every last one of them in the can.
The silver lining is I get tomorrow off.
Maybe it was because I was still a kid. Hong Jun-seok had been surprisingly considerate about the schedule.
If we shot like this every day, my body would give out before anything else did.
I looked over the crew with a new kind of respect. These people did this every single day.
They're amazing.
And they probably weren't even getting paid that much. Plenty of people wanted to work on a film set. The seats were limited.
I dragged my wrecked body over to them.
"Thank you for all your hard work!"
It was the highest praise I could offer the people who'd suffered through the day alongside me.
The next day.
Hahh. This is the life.
I was sitting with my family over a big bowl of watermelon hwachae — cold chunks of fruit drowning in lemon-lime soda.
"Yena, weren't you exhausted yesterday?"
"I was. But it was fun."
Dad picked up from there.
"That's all that matters, then. If acting ever stops being fun, you tell us. You can walk away whenever you want. Our girl has more talent than she knows what to do with, right? Pick whatever you actually want."
"Yeah."
Still, I didn't think I'd be quitting anytime soon.
Acting had been genuinely fun.
I kept coming back to that first scene — the one where I'd forgotten the camera even existed and sunk so far into Lee Ha-neul that the rest of the world fell away.
It felt like I'd become her.
Or maybe like she'd become me.
It had just been… the best. When the immersion broke and I looked at the camera again, I'd known it in my bones. In that moment, I had given the best performance my current skill would allow.
"I can't wait for tomorrow…"
The words slipped out before I could stop them. Ju Seo-hui and Lee Tae-seok watched their daughter mutter to herself and smiled, warm and thoroughly pleased.
Their girl was clearly head over heels for this acting thing.
Time ran fast. Before I knew it, the Daegu-haeng shoot had rolled into its back half, and I found myself at the movie theater with Mom, Dad, and Park Ha-jun and Seo A-rin's families in tow.
"This is gonna be good."
"I-I think it'll be fun too."
"Don't let your guard down just yet. Plenty of movies have a great trailer and nothing else."
"R-right!"
"Still, this one should be fun, shouldn't it?"
"The trailer was the kind you'd have to actively try to make boring, yeah."
Just picturing Tom Cruise hanging off the side of an airplane was enough to make a dull movie feel almost impossible.
"What was the title again?"
"Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"No idea. Look it up if you're curious."
Ha-jun pulled out his phone and started searching.
"It says it means a state or coalition of states that pursues its own interests while ignoring international law and norms."
"Oh yeah? Then it's definitely gonna be good."
"How do you figure?"
"Breaking the law is always fun. That's just how it works."
"? You're not supposed to break the law, though."
"Obviously not in real life. But this is a movie. All kinds of illegal stuff you never get to see normally is going to happen, so of course it'll be a good time."
"Oh. Okay, yeah, that actually tracks."
Hearing the meaning only made me more excited. This movie was going to be even better than I'd thought.
The lights went down.
The movie was a genuine ride. IMF agent Ethan Hunt tore through a pulse-pounding adventure; the high-stakes spy work kept the tension wound tight; and when he finally pulled off the prime minister's rescue, the whole theater got a fat hit of dopamine for its trouble. The action was a blast to watch, and every time the hero started wrecking shop, the adrenaline came up like a wave.
And then it was over.
The lights came up. I watched the credits crawl and made up my mind.
I have to review this. No question.
I'd been carrying around this quiet prejudice that older movies just weren't that fun. Interstellar and this one had taken that prejudice out back and ended it.
"That was awesome!"
"Y-yeah!"
I went home. I did not upload a review that same day.
The Oracle of Delphi? That's putting me on way too high a pedestal.
I knew how people on the internet worked. When I was on a heater they'd praise me like I'd hung the moon — but the second I slipped, the second I missed on a ten-million-viewer movie, they'd tear me to pieces. That much was guaranteed.
I need to peel that Oracle of Delphi sticker off while I still can.
While people could still write it off as luck, I had to get out from under that ridiculous nickname. I knew the future, sure — but I didn't actually know which movies were going to hit ten million.
Three in a row I can still talk my way out of. Just luck. A hot streak.
Four in a row, though, and the narrative would get away from me completely. People would start saying that any movie the YouTuber Neoguri reviewed was guaranteed to hit ten million.
I wanted nothing to do with a misunderstanding like that.
I built the review video first, then sat back and watched how things developed.
What is this? Is this one going to ten million too?
Movies that cracked ten million usually pulled more than 500,000 on day one. Four hundred and seventy thousand was more than enough potential to get there.
Yeah. I'm not posting this.
The angle toward ten million was too clean. Frustrating as it was, the video I'd already made was going to have to stay in the drafts.
That's a ten-million pace if I've ever seen one.
I folded up whatever leftover hope I'd had of posting the video and put it away.
But the longer it ran, the more the momentum started to break.
I was watching the numbers, and I smiled.
From the look of it, there was no world in which this thing crawled all the way to ten million.
Heh. I like this.
The way the chart was bending, even seven million was going to be a stretch.
It's the other movies.
New releases were climbing the chart and cutting this one's legs out from under it. You could see the momentum dying in real time.
Then I can post the review, right?
No matter how big my reach had gotten, there was no universe in which my video dragged four million extra people into theaters.
So as week five wound down, I took the shot of Tom Cruise hanging off that airplane, slapped it on as a thumbnail, and uploaded my fourth movie review.
Only two weeks left in its run. Even if it bounces, seven million is the ceiling.
Week six was almost here, and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation was still parked in the low six millions.
What I hadn't accounted for was that some movies become ten-million hits the slow way — on late word of mouth.
And my review video was the perfect detonator for a blast like that.
People piled into the chat buzzing, half-convinced another ten-million movie had just been crowned — and then they realized the film was already heading into its sixth week, and the excitement went cold.
I scrolled through the reactions with a deeply satisfied smile.
That's right, that's right. I am not the Oracle of Delphi.
What Lee Yena had failed to account for was that somewhere along the way, the YouTuber called Neoguri had become an icon all on her own.
And so, in week six, carried along by the YouTuber Neoguri's reach, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation punched through seven million.
Yeah. I figured it might do about this much.
There was still no way it was filling in the remaining three million in a single week. Even the people who'd watched my review and actually gone to the theater were starting to thin out.
My best guess was a final tally around 7.5 million.
Then, on the first day of week seven, something I had not seen coming detonated in my face.
Tom Cruise had looked into a camera and thanked me in clumsy, careful Korean. With a thumbs-up!
The video went up and spread like a fire through dry grass. Five million views, just like that.
This was 2015. The country was still running low on patriotic fuel.
The famous group BTR hadn't exploded onto the world stage yet. Globally viral hits like the dalgona candy games were still years away. The average Korean's threshold for a patriotic high was, at this point in history, painfully low.
The result: on the day Tom Cruise's video dropped, ticket sales spiked so hard the movie pulled 500,000 viewers in a single day.
That surge held all the way through the final day. And when the dust settled, the final record for Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation was—
A brand-new ten-million movie had just been born.
On the day Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation closed out its 11-million run and came down from theaters, another video went up.
Tom Cruise, on camera, telling me — and the entire country — that he loved us.
The day that new video dropped, my subscriber count detonated all the way to three million. And my reaction to all of this was as follows.
"?"