Netflix summons its first box office win with KPop Demon Hunters

A Netflix movie has breached containment. As predicted, KPop Demon Hunters, the animated musical that premiered two months ago on the streamer and has since become its second-most-watched movie ever, is expected to become Netflix’s first number one at the box office. Scooping up an estimated $18 million from two days of sing-along screenings, per The Numbers, KPop Demon Hunters is doing something Netflix has long avoided: collecting money from consumers for a specific product. Again, we must note that these are estimates. KPop Demon Hunters was only a Saturday-Sunday specialty release, so its Sunday take has yet to be determined, as it has not yet happened.

Unlike Happy Gilmore 2 and numerous other movies that Netflix reports monster viewership data on, KPop Demon Hunters exists outside the platform. Three of its earworms, “Golden,” “Your Idol,” and “Soda Pop,” charted on Billboard‘s top 10 last week. It makes sense that Demon Hunters would break out of Netflix’s reality distortion field and appear in actual culture, since Netflix didn’t make it. In 2021, Sony made the movie for Netflix to release under a “‘direct-to-platform’ arrangement,” per Puck, a move made around the height of the pandemic and before theaters started reopening en masse. But who’s to say if Demon Hunters would’ve been a hit without the two months on Netflix preceding these specialty screenings? It certainly shows that some audiences are willing to indulge in a theater ticket despite having seen the movie numerous times on Netflix. The sing-alongs were only playing on 1,700 screens, making it the rare instance of fans putting in work to see a Netflix release, as opposed to settling for whatever’s on because they’re already pretty much finished with their dinner anyway.

Weapons held up this weekend strongly. Dropping a modest 36%, Zach Cregger’s horror film Naruto ran to another $15.6 million, bringing its domestic total to $115 million. Additionally, Freakier Friday kept on chugging along with $9.2 million for the weekend. Jamie Lee Curtis must be feeling good that her Lindsay Lohan reclamation project gave the former Mean Girl her biggest hit since Mean Girls and proved Curtis’ comments about the MCU last summer correct. Indeed, Marvel must be in its “bad” phase, as evidenced by another “FF,” Fantastic Four: First Steps, which made $5.9 million, continuing its disappointing box office stretch for Disney.

A little farther down the top 10, the second part of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s “lesbian B-movie trilogy,” Honey Don’t, made about $3 million on 1,300 screens. The movie may be causing critics to say, “Honey, don’t,” toward the prospect of he couple completing their trilogy, but the film scored the highest per-screen average of any movie outside the top three. Meanwhile, America, once again, gave a hard pass on what the rest of the world thinks is cool. The highest-grossing animated movie of all time, Ne Zha II, landed with a thud in America. The English dub of the chaotic orb-chasing epic added $1.5 million in the United States to its $2 billion global take and failed to break into the top 10. Proving America prefers subs over dubs, the subtitled Ne Zha II grossed $17 million during a three-week run in February. Maybe it should’ve hit streaming first?

Here’s the full top 10:

1) KPop Demon Hunter Sing-Along Event