A South Korean movie chain gave out collectible tickets for a film about the 1974 assassination attempt on President Park Chung-hee, with bullet holes positioned over the seat where his wife was killed. After opposition lawmakers demanded its destruction and threatened a parliamentary summons, Megabox apologized and promised a new review step.

Megabox is one of Korea's three big cinema chains. Like its rivals, it gives moviegoers free collectible tickets for selected releases, designed in-house and prized enough by fans that they often turn up on resale sites. For a new film called “The Assassin(s)”, it designed a collectible ticket around a real event: the 1974 Liberation Day ceremony at Seoul's National Theater, where a gunman targeting President Park Chung-hee fatally shot the first lady, Yuk Young-soo.

The ticket came with a clear plastic overlay and when you line it up, six bullet holes appear over the podium, the audience seating, the South Korean flag, and a figure resembling Yuk in the seat where she was shot. The tickets went out starting at the film's September 23 opening. On October 2, Lee Ki-in, who chairs the Reform Party's emergency committee, posted that the design seemed to make the audience complete the shooting scene with their own hands. The next day, People Power Party lawmaker Joo Jin-woo called it “immoral” merchandise, demanded its removal as well as an apology, and said that if Megabox didn't act that day he would push to summon its CEO to the National Assembly's audit and start a boycott.

The film itself sits in a much bigger fight.

Park's legacy still divides the country, and the Park Chung-hee Foundation says the film distorts a historical tragedy and has also demanded an apology and a halt to screenings. Moviegoers see it differently, or at least they're still buying tickets: the film passed two million admissions in its first eleven days, making it the ninth Korean release this year to get there.

Megabox apologized on Sunday. In SBS's translation, it said it had "failed to deeply grasp the gravity and weight of historical tragedies" and apologized to those who felt discomfort and to those who suffered at the time. It said it would destroy every remaining ticket and set up an internal process to review the social and ethical implications of merchandise dealing with historical events or figures. And it explained how it happened: the schedule was tight, the staff who made the ticket hadn't seen the film, and they worked only from a limited set of images supplied in consultation with the distributor and production company.

Let’s start with what it gets right.

The company is the subject of its own sentences. Nobody is arguing that the critics are just overreacting or that the design was taken out of context. The apology came within a day of a lawmaker threatening a parliamentary summons, so the speed wasn't entirely voluntary but still plenty of companies under that kind of pressure stop at regretting any offense caused. Megabox also identified and called out a process change so that's more than most.

Now did they take full accountability? Not quite. "We failed to grasp the gravity" is basically describing a lapse in understanding. But the thing itself, that the company designed and handed out a ticket with a bullet hole over the seat where a woman was killed, never appears in a sentence with "we" in front of it. And the apology goes to people who "felt discomfort," which is the corporate version of "sorry you feel that way." The sorry is pointed at the reaction.

Second, destroying the leftover stock was good in theory but it was small; the tickets had mostly gone out on opening day, so this was a gesture more than it was a correction. The fix that matters, the review process, is light on substance. No one is identified as being responsible for it and no date is attached. "We will establish an internal process" is the line every company writes when it has decided it needs to be seen deciding.

Third, look at who each sentence in the apology is written for. The schedule was tight. The team hadn't seen the film. The images came from the distributor. Every one of those sentences is about the company's circumstances, and every one of them is for the company. None of them is for the people on the receiving end, and none of them points at the thing the fix is meant to repair. A review step doesn't loosen a deadline, doesn't change what a distributor sends over, and doesn't require anyone to actually watch the movie. .

What I keep thinking about, though, is that apparently nobody flagged this ticket for nine days. More than two million people saw the film in that stretch. Fans had the thing in their hands and were trading it online, and the first person to raise it was a politician, not a customer. So when I say the history was obvious, I have to be careful about who it was obvious to. Anyone who hadn't just watched the movie would have seen it. Anyone who had was looking at a scene from a film. That's the whole job of the review step because the person doing it can't be a fan of the project, and they need to be able to stop a giveaway when the release date is a week out and everyone else in the room is saying there's no time. We don't know who signed off on this at Megabox, and I'm not going to pretend I do either but what I can say is that the company's explanation was about the pressure the team was under, and the solution is in response to a question nobody asked. Those are two different problems, and the apology only calls out one of them.

Megabox will make plenty more tickets, and most of them will be for films where none of this comes up. The real test of the new review won't be the next movie about an assassination but the one that looks harmless, on a tight schedule, with the distributor's images and a team that loves the film.

Who on your side has the job of catching that one, and the authority to say stop?