Tazza at 20: Every Chuseok, a Card Table Opened at the Movies — Woody Magazine

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Sept. 22, 2026 (Tue.)

FilmThe last Tazza film opens tomorrow

Tazza at 20: Every Chuseok, a Card Table Opened at the Movies

All four films were for adults only. All four were timed to open just before the holiday when Korean families go to the movies together.

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In Three Lines

The fourth and final Tazza film opens in South Korea tomorrow, Sept. 23. Like the three before it, it arrives in the run-up to Chuseok, the country's autumn harvest holiday.
Every one carried an adults-only rating. Even so, in 2014 the second film beat a family drama released the same day to top the holiday box office.
This is not a story about gambling. It is about a seat at the holiday table kept for grown-ups.

Picture a Korean living room on a Chuseok afternoon. The whole family has been tossing four wooden sticks for yut, a traditional board game. Now the adults have moved to another corner with a deck of hwatu, the small, stiff flower cards Koreans use to play a game called go-stop. In a 2017 poll of 500 adults by the Korean pollster Realmeter, yut was the top choice for family fun over the holiday, at 19.4 percent. Hwatu came second, at 10.8 percent. Among people in their 50s, the two tied at 13.1 percent.

That second table was never meant for the children. Before Chuseok in 1997, the daily Hankook Ilbo observed that adults sitting down together for go-stop had quietly become a holiday custom. The paper called the cards embarrassing for children to watch and urged families to try a game everyone could join.

Four films, four Septembers

Tomorrow the last film in the Tazza series opens across South Korea. The films are adapted from a gambling comic written by Kim Se-yeong and drawn by Huh Young-man; "tazza" is Korean slang for a card cheat. The producer, Sidus, and the distributor, CJ ENM, have said this fourth film ends the live-action series.

The first film came out in late September 2006, nine or 10 days before Chuseok fell on Oct. 6 that year. The second, "Tazza: The Hidden Card," opened on Sept. 3, 2014, five days before the holiday. The third, "Tazza: One Eyed Jack," opened on Sept. 11, 2019, two days before it. The last one opens the day before this year's holiday begins. The game at the table changed along the way. The first two films were about hwatu; from the third on, the players switched to poker.

The crowds changed, too. Korea's official ticketing network, run by the Korean Film Council, counts 5.68 million admissions for the first film, 4.01 million for the second and 2.22 million for the third. Through all of it, the release month never moved.

You will often see 6.84 million quoted for the first film. That was the nationwide tally reported at the time. In 2006, not every theater reported to the government network, and membership became mandatory only in 2010.

The four films share one more trait. Each was rated for adults only. When Korea's ratings board gave the third film that rating in 2019, it cited the violence, the language and the risk that viewers might imitate what they saw.

The family-season rule

Koreans tend to think of Chuseok as the season for family films. That is a reasonable assumption. Relatives gather under one roof over the holiday, and a trip to the theater is an easy way to fill an afternoon. Before Chuseok in 2017, an official at a securities firm told the business daily Etoday that the holiday favors movies because families go together. The same article flagged the adults-only rating of "The Outlaws," a crime thriller opening that season, as a risk.

By that logic, an adults-only film should avoid Chuseok. Parents cannot bring their children. The record points the other way.

On Sept. 3, 2014, three films opened on the same day: the second Tazza, the Hollywood action film "Lucy" and "My Brilliant Life," a family drama starring Song Hye-kyo and Gang Dong-won. On Sept. 6, the first day of the holiday, Tazza led the daily box office. The family drama finished third, with 191,635 admissions.

338,280

Admissions for "Tazza: The Hidden Card" on the first day of Chuseok 2014, more than 146,000 ahead of the family drama that opened the same day

Three years later, "The Outlaws" beat every rival that holiday season. By the end of October it had passed the first Tazza's 5.68 million.

The director's answer

One or two of these results could be luck. The director of the final film suggested otherwise. At a press screening in Seoul on Sept. 9, Choi Kook-hee was asked whether the new film was too explicit for families to watch together. The Financial News reported his reply.

"Tazza always opened at Chuseok, and it was always adults-only."

The series set out to be entertainment for adults, he added, so he saw no reason to tone it down. He, at least, did not treat the Chuseok date as an accident. He was counting on grown-ups, not on parents with small children.

Say "holiday family audience" in Korea, and most people picture parents with young children. That is a natural picture. The seats tell a different story. Last year's top Chuseok film, the comedy "Boss," drew its biggest crowds from people in their 30s and 40s, about a quarter each, according to the theater chains CGV and Lotte Cinema. Viewers 50 and older made up another 16 to 25 percent, so roughly seven in 10 were over 30. The Korea Times described the film as the go-to choice for families who wanted to see a movie together. Families or not, most of the seats went to grown-ups.

This year looks much the same. Tomorrow two adults-only Korean films open side by side: the last Tazza and a new film from the director Lee Chang-dong. By noon on Monday, two days before release, the final Tazza had sold 76,526 advance tickets. Neither "Asura," an earlier adults-only hit, nor "One Eyed Jack," the previous Tazza film, had sold that many at the same point.

Back in the living room

On Chuseok, once the family puts away the yut sticks, the adults deal their own game at a separate table. Korea's theaters kept a table like that, too. Next to the family film, one screen was for grown-ups only. For 20 years, Tazza took that seat four times. Tomorrow it plays its last hand.

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