There’s something genuinely exciting happening in the documentary-concert film space right now, and Stray Kids: The dominATE Experience is poised to be at the center of that conversation when it arrives in theaters on February 4, 2026. This isn’t just another music documentary—it’s a carefully orchestrated collaboration between some of the most compelling creative forces working today, and the anticipation building around it tells you everything you need to know about why it matters.
Let’s start with the most obvious draw: Paul Dugdale directing. If you’ve paid attention to music cinema over the last few years, you know Dugdale’s name. He’s someone who understands how to capture the visceral energy of live performance while weaving in the intimate, human stories that make audiences actually care about what they’re watching. This isn’t a static concert film—it’s a cinematic experience designed to do something deeper than just put cameras in front of a stage.
The creative vision here seems to be about capturing Stray Kids at a pivotal moment. With their record-breaking world tour and their status as one of the biggest K-pop acts globally, there’s a natural narrative arc to explore. The film will feature both the spectacular live performance from their tour and exclusive behind-the-scenes footage—that combination of public spectacle and private reality is where the most interesting documentary work happens. You get to see both sides of what it means to be at this level of global stardom.
What makes this collaboration particularly interesting is the scale of the production involved:
- Live Nation Productions bringing their expertise in large-scale live entertainment documentation
- Universal Pictures Content Group providing the theatrical distribution muscle
- JYP Entertainment ensuring the project has direct access and creative input from within Stray Kids’ own organization
- Bleecker Street contributing their reputation for thoughtful, artistically ambitious releases
This is a heavyweight lineup, and it signals that everyone involved is thinking beyond the typical concert film format.
Bang Chan, Lee Know, and Changbin stepping into this film as featured subjects is significant. These aren’t just the biggest faces of Stray Kids—they’re personalities with distinct public personas and documented complexity. Fans and newcomers alike will be watching to see how Dugdale and his team capture their individual presence, especially in those behind-the-scenes moments when the performance is over and the masks can come off.
The pre-release momentum is real. The film is set to release across standard theaters, IMAX, and specialized formats like ScreenX, 4DX, and Ultra 4DX worldwide on February 6, 2026. The fact that additional showtimes are already being added due to demand—before a single frame has played theatrically—suggests that this project is tapping into something audiences are hungry for.
The three-hour runtime is worth mentioning, because it indicates ambition. This isn’t a 90-minute highlight reel. Paul Dugdale is being given the space to tell a complete story, and in music documentaries, that kind of breathing room often makes the difference between a good film and one that actually resonates. Three hours allows for the kind of texture and nuance that transforms a concert film into something with genuine staying power.
Here’s what’s particularly intriguing about the current landscape: K-pop documentaries have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, but they’re still relatively rare in mainstream theatrical distribution. Stray Kids: The dominATE Experience could genuinely shift conversations about how music documentaries operate in cinema. If Dugdale can create something that works both for dedicated Stray Kids fans and for general audiences who are curious about the K-pop phenomenon, that’s a template worth paying attention to.
The fact that ticket presales have already surpassed $1.4 million speaks volumes about the fanbase’s investment, but more importantly, it indicates that there’s a real audience appetite for this kind of content in theatrical spaces. These aren’t streaming numbers—these are people choosing to experience this in a cinema, collectively, which changes the entire nature of how the film functions.
As we move toward the February 2026 release, what will be fascinating to watch is whether this film contributes anything meaningful to broader conversations about celebrity, performance, globalization, and creative collaboration. Does it just celebrate these artists, or does it interrogate what it means to be a global K-pop phenomenon? Can Dugdale find those moments of genuine vulnerability amid the spectacular production? Those are the questions that will determine whether this becomes a forgotten concert film or something with actual cultural resonance.
The 0.0/10 rating you see on some databases right now is simply a placeholder—the film hasn’t been released yet, so there’s literally nothing to rate. That empty slate is actually kind of perfect in a way: Stray Kids: The dominATE Experience is arriving as a blank canvas, ready to make its own impression. The groundwork has been laid by genuinely talented people with proven track records. All that’s left is for audiences to experience what they’ve created.
