Stray Kids concert film tops global box office with $19 million
"Stray Kids: The dominATE Experience," a concert film built from the K-pop group's dominATE world tour, opened across 61 territories the weekend of February 5-6, 2026, and finished that weekend at the top of the global box office with…
"Stray Kids: The dominATE Experience," a concert film built from the K-pop group's dominATE world tour, opened across 61 territories the weekend of February 5-6, 2026, and finished that weekend at the top of the global box office with $19.1 million, ahead of every wide theatrical release in the same window.
IMAX accounted for $3.9 million of that total, about 20.5 percent of the worldwide gross, the format's largest-ever opening weekend for a Korean-language release. The film did comparatively little business in South Korea itself, taking only $227,000 there. Almost all of its gross came from fans outside the group's home market, many of whom had already seen the dominATE tour in person or watched clips of it online within hours of each show.
A record year for the format
The result lands inside IMAX's best year on record. The company closed out 2025 with $1.28 billion in global box office, up 40 percent on the year before and its highest total ever, beating a 2019 record that had stood for six years. Local-language films were a big part of that growth: they brought in $405.4 million, up 66 percent on their previous high, and now make up roughly a third of IMAX's business worldwide.
Stray Kids' opening also invites a direct comparison inside the concert-film genre itself. BTS: Yet to Come in Cinemas, released in 2023, remains the benchmark: it opened to close to $40 million and finished its run around $53 million worldwide. Stray Kids did not match that, but it did something BTS's film did not have to: it won the weekend outright against a full slate of conventional theatrical releases, not just against other concert films.
A one-weekend concert documentary outdrawing the regular theatrical slate globally is not a novelty result, it is a specific piece of evidence about where audiences now place value in live entertainment. The people buying these tickets had already had the live experience, free or nearly free, on a screen in their hand. They paid a premium price again anyway, for a bigger screen and a room full of other fans.
That is good news for exhibitors investing in premium large formats, for artist management companies sitting on archival performance footage they can still monetize months after a tour ends, and for distributors willing to open a concert film wide rather than treat it as a one-night fan event. It is a harder number for anyone betting that a livestream or a short-form clip is a satisfying substitute for the room itself. Premium large-format exhibition of a live performance is no longer a niche add-on to a tour; on this weekend's numbers, it is a release window with real commercial weight behind it.
