Name: Boss
Director: Ra Hee-chan
Genre: Comedy, Action
Released: 2025-10-03T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 98 min
Cast: Jo Woo-jin, Jung Kyung-ho, Park Ji-hwan, Lee Kyu-hyung, Oh Dal-su

In most gangster films the plot runs on appetite. Somebody wants the chair, and everybody else pays for it. Boss, Ra Hee-chan’s action comedy, runs the engine in reverse. When the head of Sikgupa, the biggest gang in town, dies, his two obvious successors spend the film trying to lose the election. Soon-tae (Jo Woo-jin) wants to take his Chinese restaurant, Mimiru, national. Kang-pyo (Jung Kyung-ho) has staked his life on the tango. The one man who wants the job, Pan-ho (Park Ji-hwan), is the one nobody will give it to.

That inversion carried the film to the top of the Korean box office over the long Chuseok holiday and to nearly two and a half million tickets at home. Now it is heading to Japan, where Nikkatsu and KDDI are releasing it as BOSS／ボス and have built the campaign around a Japanese dub voiced by all four members of the vocal group Monaki and their producer, Kazuyoshi Sakai of Junretsu. None of them had dubbed a film before.

The casting is where the joke lives. Jo Woo-jin, whose credits include Default and Seobok, told Sports Kyunghyang that Boss was the first comic performance of his career, a genre he had never attempted. Handing him the reluctant favourite means the film’s least comic face carries its most absurd ambition: a gangster whose dream is a restaurant franchise. Jung Kyung-ho gets the other half of the equation, the designated heir with real standing in the organisation and no wish to use it. Park Ji-hwan plays the only candidate who actually campaigns. Lee Kyu-hyung completes the square as Tae-gyu, an undercover cop who infiltrates Mimiru as a delivery man.

Ra Hee-chan has done this before. His feature Going by the Book took a Japanese comedy about a fastidious traffic cop cast as the robber in a police drill and turned it into a Korean number one. Boss is another transplant, this time of Once a Gangster, Felix Chong’s Hong Kong crime comedy, which already had a gang cook trying to dodge the vote for the next don and a rival heir who would rather go to university. Ra kept the cook and the kitchen. He swapped the university for tango. Some faces carry over from his earlier hit as well: Ko Chang-seok, Joo Jin-mo and Lee Han-wi appear in both films.

Ra has been plain about what drew him in. “The ironic situation where they don’t want to be the boss felt like an effective way to present a comedy,” he told The Korea Times, adding that he worked “to write a deeper story that combines comedy with the dilemma of gangsters who have other dreams.” The structural bet is that a succession plot plays better as farce when every serious candidate is running away from the prize, and that the stakes come from the private dreams rather than the territory.

What the premise does not settle is how much of it is new. The engine is borrowed, and Ra himself called Boss “a movie with a cliched theme that audiences have seen during the holidays,” with action added on top. The Korea Times review found it short on laugh-out-loud moments and credited it instead with a “fast-paced plot, clean storytelling and clear ending.” That is the profile of a dependable family crowd-pleaser built for a long holiday weekend. Whether it lands the same way in Japan, without the Chuseok calendar behind it and with a dub cast leading the publicity, is the open question. The dub points the release at a broad domestic audience more than at the core Korean-cinema crowd, which is a commercial choice, not a verdict on the film.

At home, the numbers were never in doubt. Boss had its world premiere in the Korean Cinema Today special premiere section of the Busan International Film Festival on 18 September 2025 and opened on 3 October 2025, at the start of Chuseok, on 1,167 screens. It took first place with 238,895 admissions on its opening day, crossed one million in five days and two million in ten, and kept Park Chan-wook‘s No Other Choice in second place. It finished with 2,437,328 admissions and about US$15.9 million, and Variety ranked it the fifth-highest-grossing Korean film of the year. Going by the Book had drawn 2,190,250 admissions, so Ra has now landed two adaptations within a few hundred thousand tickets of each other.

Finecut, which handles international sales, has placed the film with KDDI in Japan, 213 Pictures & Media in North America, Cai Chang International in Taiwan, Clover Films in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, Khang Media in Vietnam, Star Entertainment on the Indian subcontinent and buyers in Mongolia and Cambodia. Hive Media Corp, the company behind 12.12: The Day and Harbin, produced it, with Mindmark co-presenting. The supporting cast includes Lee Sung-min as Im Dae-soo, the boss whose death sets the succession in motion, along with Oh Dal-su, Hwang Woo-seul-hye as Soon-tae’s wife, Jung Yoo-jin and Ko Chang-seok. The film runs 98 minutes, and Ra wrote it with Lee Gyu-bok and Yoon Seo-hyun.

A scene from the Korean comedy Boss directed by Ra Hee-chan — A scene from *Boss* (2025)

In North America, 213 Pictures & Media opened Boss on 17 October 2025, and the film has a US listing on Apple TV. Japan gets it on Friday 23 October 2026, when Nikkatsu and KDDI release BOSS／ボス nationwide with the Monaki dub. The Korean Film Festival Frankfurt screens it the following day.

The gangsters in Boss spend the whole film trying to give a crown away. The film itself is doing the opposite, collecting markets one release at a time.