“Parasite” Was 2020’s Most Streamed Movie Around The World

A movie that won an Oscar will often have a second revival in the theaters as people flocked to see it. Parasite was a movie that could hardly do that as the COVID-19 pandemic affected movie theater screenings.

According to the U.S. box office tally site The Numbers, the number of theaters that screened Parasite in the U.S. doubled from 1,060 to 2,001 after the film won at the Oscars. The $403,788 in sales on the Friday before the Oscars quadrupled to $1,752,333 the next week. That is until theater sales rapidly decreased in March of 2020 and eventually flattened completely in several countries.

However, there was an intense increase in the video-on-demand (streaming) market! According to the Korea Film Council‘s tally, Parasite topped the annual ranking last year with 1,606,919 streams. This was about 500,000 more than when the movie was released.

Parasite is ranked 24th in Korea’s box office rankings (10,313,161 viewers) and became the most viewed movie in the U.S. for video streams in the second half of 2020.

According to CJ ENM, it received $213 million USD from overseas theaters, with the U.S. as the highest with $53,369,749 USD. After the U.S. is Japan, France, England, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Italy, Australia, and the Netherlands. Parasite is licensed to 205 countries and was released in theaters in 71 countries. It received its highest amount in its home country of South Korea with ₩87.4 billion KRW (about $79 million USD).