We knew the American movie box office wasn’t exactly doing great in 2025—this summer has performed marginally better than last year’s, but only barely—but it’s still pretty wild when it suddenly starts looking like a movie that’s already been out on streaming for two full months might dip into theaters for a weekend and win the weekend box office. Admittedly, said film is Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, a genuine phenomenon that’s currently in second place (and likely rising) in the running for most-watched Netflix Original Movie ever, having been viewed 210 million times since it came out back in June. Still, when limited-run sing-along showings of a streaming film are on course to win the weekend—and even then, while only running in most theaters on Saturday and Sunday—it’s safe to say things are sitting just a tad fallow at the moment.
This is all per Deadline, which reports sources saying that the sing-along showings of Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans’ animated film—about a trio of demon hunters who are also, get this, a K-pop band—are on track to bring in $15 million at the box office this weekend. That’s likely to be enough to bump it above the third weekend of Zach Cregger’s Weapons, to say nothing of expected low-performing newcomers like Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t!.
Netflix only announced the KPop Demon Hunters screenings last week, positioning them as a victory lap for the Sony Animation flick, which has swiftly overtaken the streamer’s internal charts. (To say nothing of its soundtrack, which is doing similarly disruptive things over in music tracking; the album has been sitting at No. 2 on Billboard‘s 200 for weeks at this point. In a world without Morgan Wallen’s mesmeric hold on huge parts of the American music-listening public, it’d be firmly at the top.) As Deadline notes, tracking the film’s actual success in theaters is going to be tricky, because Netflix—true to its data-hoarding roots—doesn’t share box office info on those rare occasions it deigns to put its movies up on the big screen. (Although, given how much the streamer loves to brag, if KPopdoes top the charts, we’re sure we’ll hear about it.) The movie will be running all day on the 23rd and 24th in something like 1,700 theaters in the U.S., to say nothing of similar showings in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K., so it has plenty of opportunities to thrive. It helps that Netflix picked a uniquely slow weekend on the movie release calendar to pull this move, but even so: Pretty bizarre to see a streaming movie storm into the theatrical box office like this.
