Vietnam Beat the Imports at Home. Now the Films Have to Travel.

A Vietnamese psychological horror film set in an elite international school is being pitched to foreign buyers in Busan, months after Vietnamese films beat imported titles at their home box office for the first time. ^[1]

Variety reported on October 9, 2026, that Bee Entertainment is presenting "Arithmadtic" as the lead title of its slate at the Asian Contents & Film Market. The film follows a transfer student whose mysterious bond with a teacher coincides with supernatural incidents at the school. Anh Thu and Lam Thanh My star, Irving Ly directs, and it is due in Vietnamese cinemas in January 2027. ^[1]

Bee is looking for investment, co-development, distribution and rights-licensing partners. Beside "Arithmadtic" it carries four features scheduled for 2027 and three long-form television dramas. ^[1]

My reading is this. Vietnam has built something real at home, a domestic audience that now chooses local films over imports and does not do so out of charity. What it has not built is a way out. "Arithmadtic" at Busan is the first honest attempt to find one, and one film in a market stall proves nothing yet.

It is still worth watching closely, because the argument about Vietnamese cinema has moved from whether it can win at home to whether it can travel.

The wall at home

Start with the numbers, because they are large. Variety reported that Vietnamese films grossed more than VND3 trillion, about $114 million, in the domestic market in 2025, outperforming international titles there for the first time. ^[1]

VietnamNet's count at the end of October 2025 tells the same story from inside the year. Thirteen Vietnamese films had passed VND100 billion, and eight domestic titles sat among the year's top 10. What VietnamNet calls the market's localization rate had reached 69%, against 29% in 2019. ^[2]

The biggest hit was not a horror film. "Red Rain," a war film about the 81-day battle to defend Quang Tri Citadel, grossed VND714 billion and sold more than eight million tickets, which made it Vietnam's highest-grossing film at the time. ^[2]

So the milestone belongs to Vietnamese cinema as a whole. Nothing in the reporting says horror alone beat the imports, and nobody has broken the 2025 market down by genre. Anyone who says horror did it is guessing.

The critic Le Hong Lam told VietnamNet that local films' domestic revenue had risen nearly 30% year on year and that audiences were increasingly picking Vietnamese titles. ^[2] A cinema that takes a share like that from foreign releases does not need an export deal to survive. That is a very different position from the one it was in seven years ago.

Where horror fits

Horror is not the cause of the boom, but it is the genre in which the boom is most visible on Bee's own books. The first two films in Pom Nguyen's "The Corpse" franchise grossed more than VND280 billion combined, according to Variety. ^[1] Bee's 2027 slate pairs "Arithmadtic" with a horror romantic comedy, "Dealing With a Ghost." ^[1]

The genre makes commercial sense for a company with an eye on foreign buyers. A ghost story needs little translation, and it can be made at a scale a mid-sized producer can manage. Industry observers quoted by the Korea Herald add a cultural argument. They see local identity, including historical subjects and folk horror, as a possible competitive advantage. ^[4]

But horror is no guarantee. VietnamNet reported that the horror film "Torture Hill" earned VND2.1 billion and left cinemas after nine days. ^[2] Set that beside "The Corpse" and the gap is more than 130 to one. Both are Vietnamese horror films, and the audience treated them as if they came from different planets.

That gap is the best evidence that Vietnamese viewers are not buying local out of loyalty. They are choosing, film by film, and some of what they choose is ghosts.

A market that eats its own

Here the good news gets complicated. The Korea Herald, republishing a Vietnam News report, put the number of Vietnamese films released in 2025 at about 55 and said observers expect 70 to 80 in 2026. That is a rise of between roughly 27% and 45% in a year. It described a winner-takes-most market, with fierce competition for screens and a few films taking a large share of revenue. ^[4]

The head of the state's cinema department has said as much. Dang Tran Cuong, director general of Vietnam's Department of Cinema, said strong box-office performance does not by itself guarantee sustainable development, and that many projects have suffered heavy losses. ^[4]

VietnamNet's examples of the other end of the scale are blunt. Alongside "Red Rain" it found "Pawn Shop: Play and Pay," which earned VND153 million. ^[2] Lam warned that the market remains highly uneven and that films need fresh, emotionally resonant themes to hold viewers. ^[2]

So the wall at home is real, but it is a wall with a few doors in it. More films chasing the same screens will mean more flops, and flops are expensive. Experts cited by the Korea Herald also name weaknesses that more releases will not cure: screenplay quality, training, support for independent films and transparency in distribution. ^[4]

The export gap

This is where Bee's trip to Busan matters, and where the case for optimism gets thin. In a May 2026 opinion article in Tuoi Tre, Lam argued that Vietnam's domestic growth has not yet become strong international standing. He wrote that Vietnamese films rarely make a major impact abroad and that many commercially minded producers put quick returns and domestic release windows first. ^[3]

His comparison is sharp. A regional success, "How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies," sold rights in 129 markets and grossed $73 million worldwide. ^[3] The Vietnamese films "Mai" and "Bunny!!" took roughly $1.5 million to $2 million abroad, by Lam's account, largely from overseas Vietnamese audiences. ^[3]

Put Lam's figures next to Variety's and the scale becomes plain. One regional film earned worldwide about two thirds of what the entire Vietnamese domestic market earned in 2025. Two of Vietnam's own recent hits earned abroad, at most, a small fraction of that single film's total, and mostly from emigrants who already knew what they were buying. ^[1][3]

Lam's essay is opinion, and the paper treats it as one critic's assessment. But it describes the problem that Bee's slate is designed to attack. A company that wants co-development partners and rights-licensing deals before its films open is planning for the world from the start, not hoping for it afterward.

The strongest objection

The obvious objection is that this is too much weight for one film. "Arithmadtic" has not been released.

Variety's report does not give a budget, a distributor or an international sales plan, and it does not say whether any buyer has said yes. No deals from the Busan market have been reported so far. ^[1]

That objection holds as far as it goes. A slate announcement is a sales pitch, and Busan is full of them.

But it does not undercut the larger reading, because the reading never rested on this one film. It rests on audience behavior and on company ambition, and both are documented.

Viewers chose local films in numbers large enough to change the market's makeup. A producer with a hit franchise to its name and a seven-title pipeline then went looking for money and distribution beyond its borders. That is what a national cinema does when it stops asking permission.

The confidence is real. The stability is not guaranteed.

What to watch

Three things will show whether the confidence is justified. The first is whether Bee announces any partner for "Arithmadtic" or the rest of its slate. The second is how the film does when it opens in January 2027, against a market where, on the Korea Herald's reporting, 70 to 80 Vietnamese releases may be fighting over the same screens in 2026. ^[1][4]

The third is a longer wait. Pom Nguyen's next film, the action-comedy-family drama "How to Find a Fortune in 60 Days," is scheduled for the third quarter of 2027. ^[1] If one of these films reaches audiences who are not Vietnamese and have never heard of the cast, then the home wall will have turned into something better than a wall.