‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Set A Box Office Record With A Hand Tied Behind Its Back

KPop Demon Hunters

Netflix

At a certain point, I thought we were going to run out of records for KPop Demon Hunters to break, but as of this weekend, it’s shattered a new one.

KPop Demon Hunters is currently the #1 movie at then domestic box office. Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, as in, the streaming service that barely ever has a presence in theaters at all. It’s bringing in an estimated $18 million, which is admittedly a small total to win a weekend, but that’s above Weapons, Fantastic Four, Freakier Friday, Superman and all the rest.

At this point you may be able to guess the record. No Netflix movie has ever been #1 at the box office before. Netflix occasionally does limited release windows for some of its films, usually before or right when they come out, not two months later like we’re seeing with KPop Demon Hunters.

A huge thing to note here is that what KPop Demon Hunters is doing is even more impressive given the fact that it’s only released in 1700 theaters in the US, missing big chains like AMC entirely. You can compare that to its competition like Weapons, which opened in 3,631 theaters, Freakier Friday in 3,975 theaters or Fantastic Four in 4,125 theaters. So it’s doing this with less than half the scale of release of its competition. This is the “hand behind its back” I’m referencing.

With this performance, it remains to be seen whether it will now expand into more theaters. Again, Netflix never does this, but with KPop Demon Hunters about to become its most-watched movie of all time, they probably realize they’ve squeezed as much out of it as they can on the service, and they might as well make some millions at the box office. Of course, you should not expect this to become a regular thing, outside of some releases getting short, small theatrical windows (the upcoming Frankenstein, for instance). Allegedly Stranger Things’ Duffer Brothers just left Netflix for Paramount because the latter offered them the ability to make theatrical films. So Netflix may want to consider doing this more often.

So, KPop Demon Hunters has set every Netflix original movie record, and broken almost every KPop music record and now has won the box office with half the reach of its competitors. There is truly no stopping this movie, and all we can do now is wait for the obvious sequel announcement.

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