General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Miracle on 1st Street (1번가의 기적)

Miracle on 1st Street (1번가의 기적, Il-beon-ga-ui Gi-jeok) is a 2007 South Korean comedy-drama film directed by Yun Je-gyun, starring Im Chang-jung as the gangster Pil-je and Ha Ji-won as the boxer Myung-ran. It was released in South Korea on February 14, 2007, runs 113 minutes, and was rated 15 and over.¹ The film reunited the director and his two leads five years after the comedy Sex Is Zero (2002).²

Key fact	Detail
Release	February 14, 2007 (South Korea); 113 minutes; rated 15 and over¹
Director and cast	Directed by Yun Je-gyun; Im Chang-jung (Pil-je), Ha Ji-won (Myung-ran), Joo Hyun (Director Lee), Jung Doo-hong (Myung-ran's father)¹
Genre	Comedy, drama¹
Admissions	2,750,457 nationwide by the KMDb-based tally; 2,535,431 by the KOBIS official statistic³^•⁴
2007 box-office rank	6th among Korean films released that year, with a gross of 15,494,034,100 won on 340 screens⁴
Production	Doosabu Film; production budget US$3.7 million; screenplay by Yoo Sung-hyup; music by Lee Byung-woo⁵
Filming location	The Mulmangol shanty neighborhood in Busan, built as the film's set⁶

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set on 1st Street, a run-down shanty neighborhood in the middle of a city that has been earmarked for redevelopment. Pil-je, a gangster sent by businessmen to drive out the remaining residents, arrives intending to clear the street by force. His plans unravel from his first day, when he runs into Myung-ran, a tough female boxer who dreams of becoming an East Asian champion while caring for her disabled father and younger sibling. The residents, far from fearing him, put him to work on odd jobs, and the neighborhood children come to treat him as a Superman after he restores the village water supply and repairs roofs. Pil-je drifts away from his original mission and begins to fall in love with Myung-ran.⁷^•⁸

The Kookje daily's preview described the setting as Cheongsong 1st Street, a shanty town in the heart of Seoul where people without means scrape by day to day, and noted that the film draws the lives of such neighbors with a warm gaze, with a cheerful and warm score by music director Lee Byung-woo.⁹

Production

The film was produced by Doosabu Film with a budget of US$3.7 million, shot on 35mm in color with Dolby SRD sound. Yoo Sung-hyup wrote the screenplay, Kim Young-cheol was the cinematographer, Shin Min-kyung the editor, and Lee Byung-woo composed the music. Kim Joo-sung served as executive producer, with Huh Tae-gu and Yun Je-gyun as producers. CJ Entertainment handled distribution in Korea and international sales.⁵^•¹⁰

Director Yun said he did not want the doomed neighborhood, facing demolition, to look as bleak and cold as the usual image of a shanty town, and he searched the whole country for more than a month for a location.¹¹ The set was built in the Mulmangol shanty neighborhood of Busan. After the film's release, Mulmangol became well known as the film's set location, and the ecological community its residents had built was later cited in Korean urban-policy writing as a model of resident-led urban regeneration rather than demolition.⁶ A Pusan National University history publication likewise argued that the film's portrayal of the Mulmangol neighborhood invites a critical view of Busan's unchecked development logic.¹²

Release and box office

The film opened on February 14, 2007 on 340 screens (Box Office Mojo and IMDb list the earliest release date as February 15, 2007).¹^•⁷

Two official-style tallies give slightly different lifetime admissions: the KMDb-based buyers' list records 2,750,457 nationwide admissions (697,439 in Seoul) on 390 screens,³ while the KOFIC KOBIS yearly ranking records 2,535,431 admissions and a gross of 15,494,034,100 won, placing the film 6th among 2007's Korean releases behind D-War, May 18, Voice of a Murderer, Le Grand Chef, and 200 Pounds Beauty.⁴ Box Office Mojo reports a worldwide gross of $16,062,566.⁷ A Daum retrospective of Lunar New Year box-office champions lists the film's opening-weekend figure at 211,632 admissions on 340 screens, with a final cumulative total of 2,754,457 by official statistics.¹³

Reception and festival screenings

The film was invited to the Feature Film Program of the New York Asian Film Festival in 2007 and to the Panorama section of the Shanghai International Film & TV Festival in 2007; it was also shown in a JK Youn retrospective at the Moscow International Film Festival in 2017.¹⁰ On Rotten Tomatoes the Tomatometer stood at 51 percent, based on approved critics' reviews.¹⁴ IMDb users gave it 6.4 out of 10 from 482 ratings.¹⁵ On the Japanese review site Filmarks it averaged 3.1 from 159 reviews.¹⁶ Reviewers noted the film's mix of comedy and melodrama: the AsianMovieWeb review praised it for trying to be more profound than the usual genre treatment even if it consequently felt somewhat disjointed,¹⁷ and a Cine21 review described it as an edifying comedy built on a theory of innate goodness.¹¹

Place in Yun Je-gyun's career

The film was the third collaboration between Yun Je-gyun and Ha Ji-won and Im Chang-jung after Sex Is Zero, and it preceded the disaster films Haeundae (2009) and International Market (2014) that made Yun Korea's leading commercial director. A 2024 profile in the Sky Daily notes that the 2007 reunion with Yun on Miracle on 1st Street drew 2.75 million viewers, and that Yun went on to his third commercial success with Haeundae in 2009.¹⁸ In an interview after the film's release, Yun said he hoped Busan would become "a Korean Hollywood" capable of handling everything from pre-production to post-production, a remark later revisited in a Busan Film Commission discussion of the city's film-industry ambitions.¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026