By Chris Lee, a Vulture senior reporter who covers Hollywood

Photo: Netflix

As any Hunter will tell you, the power-pop girl group Huntr/x dominates the animated-musical landscape as an unstoppable, ramen-munching, ass-kicking force. The trio tops music charts and packs stadiums across Korea with their signature brand of trap-infused Girl Crush EDM while also dispatching legions of shape-shifting monsters and saving the human world from the demon realm as the heroes of Netflix’s most-watched film ever, KPop Demon Hunters. Over Halloween weekend, however, as KPDH returned to the multiplex for an astonishing second time since the summer, the juggernaut popularity of Huntr/x’s members — tough-cookie dancer-choreographer Mira, elfin rapper and throwing-knives specialist Zoey, and secretly half-demon main vocalist Rumi (voiced by Arden Cho with EJAE providing her singing vocals) — proved no match for the countervailing box-office forces of trick-or-treating and back-to-back World Series games between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays.

Even as Netflix’s scant few officially licensed Huntr/x costumes sold out and the movie’s ear-worm self-determination single “Golden” continued to reign at No. 1 on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart, a singalong version of the movie slightly undershot pre-release “tracking” estimates. According to projections from rival studios and exhibitors — because Netflix does not release streaming data or box-office numbers — the animated musical grossed somewhere between $5.3 million and $6 million while playing in 2,890 theaters across North America. (It comes in behind the absolutely psychotic Colleen Hoover adaptation Regretting You and the second weekend of Blumhouse’s Black Phone 2.)

Sure, you could fairly point out that October has been a particularly rough span of weeks for the movie industry as a whole — with Comscore tallying the worst revenue for the month in 27 years including disastrous returns for Dwayne Johnson’s awards play The Smashing Machine and Disney’s mis-Morbed Tron: Ares. And you could reasonably question the logic of Netflix returning KPop Demon Hunters to the multiplex just two months after its first theatrical run — during which the movie grossed somewhere between $18 million and $20 million. (Apropos that theatrical rerelease scheme, an anonymous distribution source told Deadline, “I don’t think there’s any juice left in that to squeeze.”)

But as anyone who has marveled at Netflix’s wildly inconsistent methodology for projecting its films inside theater walls can also tell you, big box office was never the play here. In August, KPDH became Big Red’s first title to get a theatrical run after it had already begun streaming on TVs and handheld devices months earlier. More typically, Netflix screens its movies in a handful of theaters that it owns, like Los Angeles’s Egyptian or New York’s Paris Theater, for truncated, weeklong runs as a means of drumming up pre-release awareness or added relevance, or to qualify for an Oscars run.

And yet, even after fan-performed, KPDH-inspired dances blanketed social media this summer, Netflix brokered what can only be described as a lion-lying-down-with-lambs partnerships with theater owners. Despite a yearslong standoff between Big Red and the two biggest multiplex chains, AMC Theatres and Regal Cinemas, over “windowing” — i.e., the time between movies’ theatrical releases and streaming (theater owners typically want at least a 45-day grace period; Netflix insists upon none at all) — all parties concerned, plus the Cinemark theater chain, agreed to put their differences aside. That detente, in conjunction with an abiding shortage of new wide-release film titles from Hollywood studios, set the stage for both August’s KPDH screenings in 1,700 North American theaters and the Halloween singalong redux.

To hear Netflix’s president-CEO Ted Sarandos explain things on a recent earnings call, the movie’s theatrical runs were not so much to promote the film as a kind of recompense to the KPDH fandom for giving the movie its current level of cultural saturation. “We occasionally release certain films in theaters for our fans, like we did with KPop Demon Hunters, or as part of our launch strategy, publicity marketing, [awards] qualifications, all those things,” he said. “We believe that this film, KPop Demon Hunters, worked because it was on Netflix first.”

“This actually reinforces our strategy because being on Netflix allowed the film to build momentum,” Sarandos continued. “It allowed fans to learn the songs and watch it over and over again and to make their own posts and their own dances around KPop Demon Hunters. For some films, seeing it together and singing out loud is super-fun. It’s a differentiated experience …We created a great night out.”

Easy enough to forget, then, that Netflix’s former chief executive Reed Hastings famously accused theater chains of “strangling the movie business” and, as recently as May, Sarandos answered in the affirmative when asked by an interviewer whether the theatrical experience is “outdated” and “an outmoded idea.” According to internal Netflix logic, every theatrical run is “bespoke” to the individual project. Of the 30 or so of its movies that reach theaters each year, all must exist in service to the Service’s hegemonic streaming goals.

What then to make of Netflix’s permissiveness toward the theatrical experience this awards season? In addition to KPDH, on December 31 and January 1, 350 AMC theaters across the U.S. and Canada will showcase the streamer’s two-hour Stranger Things finale as a one-night-only fan event — a seeming capitulation to showrunners the Duffer brothers, who recently agitated for a Stranger Things theatrical bow. Later this month, Netflix is planning “specialty screenings” of the Noah Baumbach–directed George Clooney award-season star vehicle Jay Kelly shown on 35-mm. film stock at “historic movie palaces around the world,” including Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema, the Music Box in Chicago, Cineteca Nacional de Mexico in Mexico City, and Tokyo’s Shin Bugeiza. And on October 17, Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein opened in “select theaters” with Del Toro telling Variety: “We will get the biggest theatrical release that Netflix gives its films. I don’t know the exact number but it’s three weeks exclusively and then it can stay in theaters longer.” (The $120 million movie is reportedly playing in 382 theaters with Netflix staying characteristically mum about its box-office tally.)

I canvased top Hollywood agents at rival talent agencies as to whether they thought Netflix was allowing itself to be bullied into more-robust-than-usual theatrical distribution by A-list directors — perhaps a knock-on effect of having granted Greta Gerwig an unprecedented, four-week-long “just theatrical” window and Thanksgiving 2026 IMAX run for her upcoming Chronicles of Narnia adaptation. One agent swore to me that Sarandos is not the enemy of theatrical movies and passionately defended the executive as a misunderstood champion of cinema. Another agent pointed to how contractions in post-strike, post-pandemic Hollywood have decimated the theater business, creating new opportunities that Netflix would be foolish to pass up.

“Right now, exhibitors are desperate: How do they fill their theaters again and more often?” said this person, who represents a who’s who of illustrious filmmakers. “So they’re going to take new creative ideas. Take some hot show that everybody loves and give it a day in theaters? Netflix doesn’t really care at that point about something like that. Historic movie palaces? Okay, but meaningless. That’s like ten or 20 theaters around the world. Who gives a shit? Ted is called the ‘father of streaming’ even though he hates it. I don’t think he’s going soft on streaming. And I don’t feel like Netflix is leaning into more theatrical.”

Has Netflix Changed Its Tune on Movie Theaters?