With KPop Demon Hunters scoring Netflix’s first big theatrical win during the weekend of Aug. 22 to 24, raking in $18 to $20 million from 1,700 North American theaters, you might think Sony Animation Pictures presidents Kristine Belson and Damien de Froberville would be kicking themselves for not releasing the film theatrically.
According to the Hollywood Reporter’s interview with Belson and de Froberville, that isn’t the case. “One million percent, it had to be on Netflix. It was the perfect storm of that movie coming together with the power of that platform. You have these check-ins: three days, 10 days, 28 days,” Belson explains.
De Froberville adds that throughout these check-in days, they received calls from Netflix to update them on the movie’s progress. The third and ten-day call was fairly neutral. However, before the film had even hit the 28-day mark, Belson reports, things changed. “We got a call from Hannah Minghella [the head of Feature Animation and Family Film at Netflix] on day 14 or something. ‘Something is going on here.’ So, it needed time, which you do not get theatrically.”
It would be the understatement of the century to say that KPop Demon Hunters has done well on streaming. It’s become Netflix’s most-watched original film (beating Ryan Reynolds’ 2021 action-comedy film, Red Notice). As of Jan. 20, it had never left Netflix’s top 10. However, at the time of writing, it has been bumped off the top-10 list.
The success of KPop Demon Hunters has the studio hard at work, though Belson may have slyly hinted that a 2029 date for KPop Demon Hunters 2 couldn’t happen.
However, Belson and De Froberville did share details about their other animated masterpiece, the Spider-Verse franchise.
“On Spider-Verse, I was like, ‘How are they going to top [2023’s] Across the Spider-Verse? And then we’re looking at art and design [for 2027’s Beyond the Spider-Verse], and it’s really blowing my mind,’ De Froberville tells the Hollywood Reporter. “We look at a lot of art, but what we saw at the last presentation, I’m like, “Wow.”
Sony Animation Pictures has also brought in a live-action director of photography, Alice Brooks. According to de Froberville, Brooks has “been directing camera in a way that we hadn’t done on Spider-Verse before. We’re in animation on Spider-Verse now. Because the directors and Chris and Phil have a chance to iterate so much early on while we’re in story, and truly visualize what it’s going look like by the time those sequences flow into the Imageworks pipeline, there’s way less changes.”
Belson and de Froberville also confirmed that spin-offs, Spider-Gwen and Spider-Punk, are in active development, but couldn’t share much else. Whether you’re a fan of KPop Demon Hunters or are eager for the next animated Spider-Man film, Sony Animation Pictures is hard at work.
