NOVEMBER 6, 2025

Welcome back to Buffering, where we’re still trying to figure out why the folks running CNN’s latest (and likely ill-fated) subscription service thought anyone would want to pay for the privilege of seeing right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, young right-wing pundit Isabel Brown, and Democratic Party–bashing commentators Charlamagne Tha God and Ana Kasparian talk about the Election Night results with former Nate Silver protégé Harry Enten. I didn’t watch (obviously), but Jeremy Barr of the Guardian did, and, yes, it was just as awful as you’d expect. 

As for this week’s newsletter, I’m focusing on a long-term assignment, so this issue features some great streaming-centric stories from Vulture: Chris Lee has a look at Netflix’s continued will-they-or-won’t-they flirtation with movie theaters, while Savannah Salazar and Nicholas Quah have a timely rank of streaming-service opening animations. Thanks for reading.

—Joe Adalian, Vulture's West Coast editor

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By Chris Lee

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 EJAEproviding 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 psychoticColleen 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 film 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 two-day-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.”

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Eric McCandless/Disney

The streaming services have duked it out on several fronts over the years — battling to put out countless movies and TV shows, grow subscribers domestically and internationally, gain live sports and television, and deliver ad-supported tiers to customers. But these streamers are just as defined by how often they reinvent themselves, as with the rebranding of HBO Max a.k.a. Max a.k.a. HBO Max and Apple TV’s recent choice to drop the plus. This week, Apple launched a new bit of logo animation with a mnemoniccomposed by Finneas. “Hope this very short piece of music feels like it matches the things I love about Apple so much,” he wrote on his Instagram. It made us wonder, What the hell was Apple TV+’s signature sound in the first place? How many of these streamers’ idents (the technical TV term for these things) do we even recall? Like? Hate? We just had to discuss the range of major streamers and their opening bumpers, from the ill-conceived to the indelible.

10. Prime Video

Nick: Prime landing at the bottom of the list is a no-brainer. Besides the fact that Prime Video barely registers as a streaming brand in my head next to Netflix or HBO Max, the actual sound it makes is just so very forgettable: generically cheerful in the way an elevator door chime is and nowhere near triggering that primal brain-tingle the good ones do. Plus it doesn’t quite click with the image of Amazon in my head. For a sonic button that really syncs, it should have a thunderous, imperial sound — like big drums — to correspond with Amazon being a giant capitalist Death Star.

Savannah: You’re right. Even the Empire had a flair for design, but Prime absolutely does not. No style, no flavor, just a whole lot of blue and a forgettable jingle. I suppose that’s on brand for Prime, though it does no justice to their pretty good originals.

9. Peacock

Savannah: Peacock is actually the streaming home of some incredible bumpers: NBC’s jingle and Law & Order’s famous dun dun. But can you recall Peacock’s? Unfortunately, probably not. The rainbow-colored balls stacking on top of one another are cute, but when it comes to the ident, it’s fine. It’s trying to evoke NBC’s three-note chime with its own three-note intro, but man, that’s just tough competition.

Nick: Yeah, it’s truly damned by the power of its forebear. The rainbow-chicken chime is really one of those jingles that’s going to endure even if the world ends in nuclear fallout. I think part of the issue with Peacock specifically is that it plays a little too cartoony. That tracks with NBC’s long history with strong comedy slates, but the trade-off is insufficient gravitas.

8. Paramount+

Nick: I don’t mind the Paramount+ bumper. In fact, I actually appreciate the attempt to “streaming-ify” the classic mountain logo. There’s a way you can view this as a stately and self-referential nod to preserving ... 

➼ The carriage battle between Disney and YouTube TV continues, and I have to say, I’m with CNBC’s Alex Sherman, who writes in his latest CNBC Sport newsletter, “I honestly don’t know which side has the leverage” in this standoff. This thing has already dragged on longer than I’d have thought, and what’s most interesting to me is that neither side has tried to nudge viewers: YouTube TV hasn’t offered a credit to customers (as it has in the past when it’s had to black out content), and, as far as I know, Disney isn’t offering any special rates to YouTube TV customers to try out Hulu with Live TV or Fubo TV, the two digital cable platforms it owns. Maybe that’s a reason to be optimistic this all gets worked out soon?

➼ HBO/HBO Max chief Casey Bloys has been saying since before The Pitt premiered that, in success, he’d want to make more shows using its model — lower costs, extended episode counts, annual seasons. And after the show turned into a smash, he told me last spring that his team was developing several projects using said model. Now Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva is out with the news that the streamer has given pilot orders to two potential Pitt-style hours, including a family drama from Greg Berlanti. It wouldn’t shock me to see at last one of these projects on the platform by next fall. 

➼ America’s Funniest Home Videos is quietly one of TV’s most underappreciated franchises, regularly delivering a strong audience to ABC’s 7 p.m. Sunday hour week after week for what is no doubt a fraction of what the network pays for most of its other entertainment programming. Now that franchise is coming to Samsung TV Plus, the home to Letterman, Conan, and, soon, an endless loop of toddlers, pets, and inanimate objects torturing suburban dads with well-aimed shots to the groin. (In other words, AFV is getting its own FAST channel.) 

➼ ABC might not be thinking about adding another night of Dancing With the Stars, but it is giving fans a holiday special that will air December 3, a week after the show’s November 25 finale.  

➼ If you’re a branding nerd and our story this week about streaming bumpers isn’t enough to satisfy your interests, Variety has a deep dive with Finneas about how he created Apple TV’s new audio signature. 

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