“Stop watching my movie.”
This is what Song Joong Ki, the male lead of “A Werewolf Boy” tells his fans when he goes to give his stage greetings. Each time Song Joong Ki stood on stage before the movie started, he would say, “Stop watching my movie,” which perplexed the crowd. But finally, he opened up and shared his reasons.
Song Joong Ki shared, “I had a few conversations with some female students in the audience while we were giving our stage greetings for the film. The students told me, ‘I watched your movie 16 times,’ and ‘I watched it 35 times.’ So I told them, ‘Why did you watch the same movie that many times? Isn’t 7,000 won (about $6.50) big money to students?’ And then I had no choice but to tell them to stop watching the film.”
“A Werewolf Boy” was released on October 31 and has surpassed the 6.5 millionth view and it seems like it is largely thanks to the many female students re-watching the film over and over again. It is common for fans to re-watch performances like musicals, plays and concerts since it is a live performance and may contain different bits and pieces each time. However, it isn’t very common for people to re-watch films in the movie theater. A special event survey showed that a 16-year-old student watched “A Werewolf Boy” more than 70 times in the theater.
A 17-year-old high school female student, who is a Song Joong Ki fan, commented, “After the drama, ‘Nice Guy‘ was over, I couldn’t see oppa anymore so that’s why I went to the theater,” and “I cry each time I watch the movie because of Chul Soo (Song Joong Ki’s character in the movie).”
It is clear that Song Joong Ki’s immense star power had a lot to do with the success of this movie. Song Joong Ki, along with his co-star Park Bo Young and director Jo Sung Hee went around to 105 different movie theaters to give their stage greetings. It is rare for a film cast to give more than 100 different stage greetings. The stage greeting happens before the film starts and the audience members are able to see the stars of the film right before their eyes.
The film staff posted up dates and locations for these stage greetings on their Facebook, Twitter and Internet fan cafes, which also led to many requests for stage greetings being made from different areas. Last month, when the CSATs were over, an influx of female high school students occurred at these stage greetings. Over 600,000 “likes” were made for photos of these stage greetings on the “A Werewolf Boy” official Facebook page.
Director Jo shared, “I don’t think I’ll forget that one passionate fan who showed me her scrapbook filled with still cuts from the film and movie ticket stubs.”
