Toward the end of last year, a South Korean military strongman achieved a rare posthumous feat. Chun Doo-hwan, who ruled the country with an iron fist for much of the 1980s, saw off the challenge of Napoleon Bonaparte at the Korean box office. After its November release, the film 12.12: The Day, which depicts a period of nine hours on December 12, 1979, during the first of Chun’s two coups, comfortably outperformed Ridley Scott’s mediocre yet world-conquering epic.

By Christmas, the gripping political thriller had sold more than ten million tickets in a country of 51.7 million people. The success of the film was partly driven by fears about South Korea’s current president Yoon Suk-yeol, the former prosecutor general who ascended to the presidency in 2022.

Yoon has been using a cabal of prosecutors to chip away at democracy and solidify his hard-right rule in ways that are reminiscent of Chun’s rule. Chun mobilized a clique of officers in a rolling coup that first seized control of the military hierarchy and then took over the government after massacring hundreds of young protesters in the city of Gwangju.