Why ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Is a Fascinating Hollywood Experiment

The Town with Matthew Belloni

The Ringer

Society & Culture

4.3 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Matt is joined by Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw to discuss Netflix’s surprise hit ‘KPop Demon Hunters,’ which has become their second-most popular English-language film. Unexpectedly, Netflix decided to release ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ in theaters, where it brought in nearly $20 million in ticket sales despite releasing on streaming in June. Matt and Lucas discuss why Netflix did this despite its very clear view on movie theaters, whether the movie could have been a massive hit had it gone straight to theaters, and why AMC refused to show this movie (02:49). Matt finishes the show with a prediction about the upcoming season of ‘Saturday Night Live’ (24:45). For a 20 percent discount on Matt’s Hollywood insider newsletter, ‘What I’m Hearing ...,’ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Email us your thoughts! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thetown@spotify.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Host: Matt Belloni Guest: Lucas Shaw Producers: Craig Horlbeck and Jessie Lopez Theme Song: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you care about Hollywood, and I assume you do if you're listening to the town, you should really be getting the whole story about Hollywood. That's what you get with Puck. I'm a founding partner at Puck, and I write a newsletter called What I'm Hearing. It's got exclusive news for insiders and analysis of the biggest stories. Puck has a bunch of great journalists. We just hired Kim Masters, who also covers Hollywood from the inside, plus media, sports, fashion,
0:21.7	politics, and finance. It's a must have for plugged-in people. Fans of the town get a
0:26.6	discount on the description page of this episode or at puck.news slash the town. Go further into
0:32.1	Hollywood by becoming a puck member today. It is Monday, August 25th.
0:38.7	A lot of truly bizarre things have happened in Hollywood over the past few years.
0:42.3	That's sort of why this show exists.
0:44.5	But these are the words I never thought I'd say.
0:47.0	The number one movie at the box office this weekend was a movie that has been available
0:50.7	at home for two months on Netflix.
0:53.9	It's K-pop demon hunters, of course, with an estimated $18 million to $20 million in ticket sales.
0:59.5	That's playing only on a Saturday and Sunday, and only in about 1,700 theaters.
1:04.1	That works out to about $11,000 per location, a pretty great per-screen average,
1:09.2	considering Netflix only announced the
1:10.9	sing-along version of the animated movie would be in theaters about two weeks ago.
1:15.2	Right around the time, a song from the soundtrack hit number one on the billboard chart.
1:19.8	The movie didn't play in the country's biggest chain because AMC Theaters refuses to play
1:24.2	movies from Netflix, which doesn't give its titles a meaningful, exclusive theatrical
1:28.3	window. And we only know the box office numbers because rival distributors and exhibitors are
1:33.6	leaking the numbers. Netflix, which loves to talk about how transparent it is with data,
1:38.3	refused to release box office data for this movie. So lots of issues here. First, why did Netflix do this? K-pop demon
1:45.9	hunters is already on track to become the most viewed movie in the history of Netflix. It's at about
1:50.9	210 million views and counting. And the company's views on movie theaters are pretty well known.
	...

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