Seoul's Single-Screen Cinemas: Where Did They Go?

Going to the pictures in Seoul used to mean going downtown. You took the bus to Jongno 3-ga or Chungmuro, queued outside a building with a hand-painted poster three storeys tall, and sat with a thousand strangers in front of a single screen.

The 단관극장 (dangwan geukjang, “single-hall theatre”) was the only kind of cinema Korea had for most of the twentieth century. The last of the great ones, Daehan Cinema in Chungmuro, closed in September 2024. Its auditorium is now a theatre set for an immersive play.

This is Part 4 of our Vanished Seoul series.

Where did Korean cinema begin?

On one street corner in Jongno, more or less.

Dansungsa (단성사) was founded in 1907 in Myo-dong, near today’s Jongno 3-ga, as a stage for traditional performances. The impresario Park Seung-pil turned it into a cinema in the late 1910s and rebuilt it in brick. On 27 October 1919 it premiered Righteous Revenge (의리적 구토), counted as the first Korean-made film, and the date became Korea’s Film Day. According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture it was renamed Daeryuk Theatre in 1940 and took back its name after liberation.

A few hundred metres away, Umigwan, opened in 1910, is usually described as Korea’s first permanent cinema. It seated about a thousand, employed live narrators for silent films, and closed on 30 November 1982.

How big was cinema-going at its peak?

Enormous, and it peaked earlier than most people guess.

The golden age was the 1960s. Korean media drawing on film archive publications put 1969 at 659 cinemas and 173 million admissions, in a country of about 30 million: roughly 5.7 trips to the cinema per person per year. Television then arrived in Korean homes and admissions fell for two decades.

Films moved through a strict hierarchy of theatres. A new release opened at a downtown 개봉관 (premiere house) with a thousand-plus seats. Weeks later it moved to a 재개봉관 (second-run house) in the outer districts, and finally to a neighbourhood 동시상영관 (double-feature house), where one ticket bought two films, often badly spliced, in a room that smelled of squid snacks and cigarettes. Film prints were expensive, so a movie physically travelled from the centre of Seoul to its edges. Digital projection, which let a film open on every screen at once, eventually made the whole ladder pointless.

🎬 Seoul's great single-screen cinemas and what became of them

Why did multiplexes win?

Comfort, choice, and parking, delivered by conglomerates with deep pockets.

CJ opened CGV Gangbyeon in Guui-dong, Gwangjin-gu, on 4 April 1998: 11 screens and 1,922 seats in one building, with direct access from Gangbyeon subway station and shopping on the doorstep. According to CJ, it drew 3.5 million visitors in its first year, with weekend occupancy near 80% when the Seoul average was around 45%. Lotte Cinema and Megabox followed. The number of screens nationwide went from 507 in 1998 to 1,132 by 2003, according to the Hankook Ilbo, as a multiplex could run a hit on three screens and a flop on one while the single-screen house had to bet everything on one film.

The old houses tried to adapt. Seoul Cinema was the first to split itself into multiple screens, three in 1989 and seven by 1997, and liked to call itself Korea’s first multiplex. Daehan, once nicknamed the “Ben-Hur theatre” because it could project 70mm prints, split into 11 screens in 2001. Dansungsa was torn down and rebuilt as a seven-screen multiplex in 2005. None of it worked for long. Dansungsa went bankrupt in 2008. Piccadilly passed to CJ CGV in 2015. Seoul Cinema closed on 31 August 2021, after 42 years, with the pandemic as the final push. Daehan closed on 30 September 2024.

The multiplexes are now struggling themselves. The Korean Film Council’s 2025 settlement counted 106.09 million admissions, down 13.8% on 2024 and less than half the pre-pandemic level, with 23 fewer cinemas and 142 fewer screens than a year earlier. For how the chains compare today, see our Seoul cinema guide and the IMAX, 4DX and Dolby comparison.

Seoul did try to hold on to the memory, if not the buildings. The city lists “Seoul Future Heritage” sites, a non-binding designation for places that matter to the city’s recent past, and both Seoul Cinema and the Hollywood Theater were listed in 2013. The designation carries no legal protection, which is why a listed cinema can still close, and why the heritage plaque often outlives the business it describes. Myungbo, described as the first cinema in Korea designed by Koreans when it opened in 1957, lives on as the Myungbo Art Hall, a stage for musicals and plays on the same Chungmuro corner.

Where can you still feel the old cinemas in Seoul?

In one working silver cinema, one renamed multiplex, a theatre that took over a cinema, and a museum.

Hollywood Theater (허리우드극장), Nakwon Building. Opened in August 1969 on the fourth floor of the Nakwon Arcade building above the musical instrument market, it became a multiplex in 1997 and, since 2009, a 실버영화관 (silver cinema) showing classics for older viewers. The operator’s October 2026 schedule includes Gone with the Wind and On the Waterfront, and tickets are 2,000 won for those aged 60 and over. After the Cheongchun silver cinema in Seodaemun closed on 31 December 2025, the Kukmin Ilbo reported that Hollywood is the last one in Seoul. On a weekday afternoon, surrounded by a full house of pensioners watching Vivien Leigh, you are about as close as it gets to the old single-screen experience.

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CGV Piccadilly 1958, Jongno 3-ga. The old Piccadilly, which opened in 1958 as the Bando and took the Piccadilly name in 1962, reopened under CJ CGV in 2016 with its founding year in the name. It is a normal multiplex now, but it stands on the old triangle, a few steps from the Dansungsa site.

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The former Daehan Cinema, Chungmuro. Since summer 2025 (previews from July, official opening in August) the building has housed Sleep No More Seoul, the immersive theatre production, with the whole building rebuilt as a hotel set. You will not see a film there, but you can walk into the shell of Chungmuro’s last great cinema. The Seoul Shinmun reported in July 2026 that tickets cost 160,000 to 200,000 won and are released a month or two at a time through Korean booking sites.

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Korean Film Museum, Sangam. Run by the Korean Film Archive in Digital Media City, with free ticketed entry and a cinematheque screening Korean classics. The best place in Seoul to see the posters, projectors and programmes of the single-screen era.

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If you want the modern films in modern seats, you will not lack for them. If you want to see where Seoul’s films were actually made and set, our field-checked filming locations guide picks up the story from here.