Musicals Claim a Third of Korea's Weekly Stage Market

Musical theater took a markedly larger slice of South Korea’s live performance market in the final full week of June 2026, rising to 34% of tracked box-office activity from 24% the week before — a 10-percentage-point gain that pulled the genre closer to pop concerts at the top of the chart, according to the Korea Performing Arts Box Office Information System (KOPIS).

Musicals Fill the Middle While Pop Holds the Peak

Of the 50 productions on the weekly box-office ranking, 17 were musicals against 25 pop-music concerts, with plays accounting for five and dance, multidisciplinary work, and Western classical music one each. That split gave pop the numerical edge overall, but the picture inverts in the upper reaches of the chart.

Pop tours owned the two highest spots — Stray Kids World Tour: RUN IT [Seoul] at No. 1 and aespa’s LIVE TOUR - SYNK: COMPLaeXITY - at No. 2 — yet musicals occupied six of the top ten. Elisabeth ranked third, followed by Frozen at fourth, Beethoven at fifth, and Billy Elliot at sixth; Yumi’s Cells and Those Days landed at eighth and ninth. The remaining top-ten places went to pop acts, with the Wuthering Waves World Tour: To the New World at seventh and the SERIES.L bill featuring HANRORO’s Promenade at tenth. Every one of the ten played in Seoul.

A Wider Field After 28 New Openings

The week’s reshuffle was driven partly by turnover: 28 productions entered the ranking for the first time, among them the Stray Kids and Wuthering Waves tours and the long-running import Elisabeth. Ten titles climbed relative to the prior week while nine slipped, leaving the chart more churned than static.

Concentration Eases at the Top

Alongside the musical surge, the market spread out. The combined share held by the leading genres fell to 50% from 60%, meaning box-office activity was distributed across a broader mix of formats rather than clustering behind one or two dominant categories. Read together with the musical gains, the figures point to a week in which large-scale pop tours still captured the biggest single audiences while stage productions deepened their presence through the middle of the ranking.