The K-pop group’s ‘Dominate Experience’ debuted at No. 1 worldwide. The numbers tell a bigger story than the milestone alone.
Stray Kids (JYP Entertainment)
Sixty-one countries, $19 million in one weekend. The men delivered.
“Stray Kids: The Dominate Experience,” the concert movie built around the eight-member boy band’s gig at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium last year, opened Friday and promptly did something no K-pop release has managed before: top the global weekend box office.
A sold-out world tour is one thing. Topping the global box office is another. The film grossed $19.1 million across 61 territories in its opening weekend, according to the group’s agency JYP Entertainment. In North America, distributor Bleecker Street’s new event-cinema label Crosswalk placed it in 1,724 locations, where it pulled in $5.7 million through Sunday.
As of Monday, that domestic figure had climbed to roughly $6.4 million, according to US box office tracker The Numbers.
Stray Kids are hardly the first K-pop act to bet on the big screen. BTS got there first, and their numbers set a high bar. “BTS: Yet to Come in Cinemas,” released in 2023 before the group’s members began their mandatory military service in South Korea, earned around $53 million globally across its run. The group’s earlier “Bring the Soul: The Movie” drew $24.3 million back in 2019.
Neither total is within reach yet on opening-weekend numbers alone, but Stray Kids cleared the roughly $18 million total that BTS’s 2018 “Burn the Stage: The Movie” posted — a stronger launch than the group that put K-pop concert films on the map.
Stray Kids on stage at SoFi Stadium from a still from “Stray Kids: The Dominate Experience” (JYP Entertainment)
Part of why the film works as well as it does may come down to the caliber of the production. “The Dominate Experience” was directed by Paul Dugdale, a Grammy, BAFTA and Emmy winner behind live-event films for Adele, Taylor Swift, Coldplay and the Rolling Stones. This one was his first K-pop project.
“Our challenge was to find pockets where we could show the colossal scale of the event — choreography, scenic and lighting production, and Stray Kids fans — while trying to never miss a vocal line,” Dugdale told Forbes on Tuesday.
Filmmaker Farah X, who directed the documentary segments threaded between performances, told Forbes she conducted individual interviews with each of the group’s members to give the film a more personal dimension than a standard concert film.
The film’s premium-format rollout likely gave the numbers an extra push. IMAX accounted for about 20 percent of the global haul, or roughly $3.9 million — the format’s biggest opening weekend ever for a Korean-language release, according to Deadline.
The format reaches well beyond IMAX. The film also screened widely in 4DX, the motion-seat cinema experience from South Korea’s CJ Corporation. Across major markets, the rollout included 27 4DX and 24 IMAX screens in Mexico, 35 4DX and 50 IMAX locations across the UK and Ireland, and similar configurations in Germany, Italy and Australia.
With premium tickets running $25 and up in many of those markets, the unusually high format share props up the per-seat revenue and points to a fanbase willing to spring for the most immersive experience on offer.
The reviews suggest the fans got their money’s worth. Many viewers pointed to the film’s sweeping drone shots, multilevel camera angles spanning from the stadium floor to the 500 level, and the sheer physical scale of the stadium’s architecture as qualities that popped in large formats.
4DX screenings — where seats tilt with the camera work and wind, mist and vibrations punctuate the choreography — seem to have particularly pushed the experience into something closer to a ride than a screening. One reviewer walked out of a 4DX press showing feeling, by their own description, “a bit wobbly.”
In Korea, the film is available exclusively through multiplex chain CGV in all premium formats, including IMAX, ScreenX and 4DX.
moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com