BTS Drops Arirang Live Viewing Trailer Worldwide

• BTS will broadcast its Arirang concerts from Goyang and Tokyo live to 3,800 cinemas in 80 countries, with tickets already on sale.
• The group's prior live cinema event grossed $32.6 million globally in 2022; its 2021 SoFi Stadium run earned $33.3 million from four nights.
• The Arirang campaign bundles a studio album, a world tour, a Netflix webcast, and a documentary into a single, multi-platform rollout.

BTS has released the first trailer for BTS World Tour 'Arirang' Live Viewing, the clearest signal yet of the scale the group's comeback will operate at. The 30-second clip, cut to "Mic Drop," shows the septet on a 360-degree stadium stage with synchronized ARMY Bomb light displays filling the stands.

The live viewing will broadcast premiere-night performances from Goyang, South Korea (April 11) and Tokyo, Japan (April 18) to more than 3,800 cinemas across 80 countries. Each market gets two dedicated screenings. Tickets are already available through the official portal.

What BTS' previous tours grossed, and why it matters now

Arirang, BTS' fifth studio album, arrives on March 20. The accompanying tour, which sold out multiple European dates within 60 minutes, is the group's first full-scale run as a seven-member act since Permission to Dance on Stage in 2021-22.

That earlier cycle set a high commercial bar. According to Billboard Boxscore, BTS' four-night stint at Los Angeles' SoFi Stadium grossed $33.3 million from 214,000 tickets in late 2021, one of the highest single-venue earnings reported that year. The group then extended the run to movie theaters: BTS Permission to Dance On Stage - Seoul: Live Viewing pulled in $32.6 million worldwide on March 12, 2022, running in 3,711 cinemas across 75 countries. At the time, it was the highest-grossing live cinema event on record.

How BTS' multi-platform comeback works

The Arirang live viewing is one piece of a broader rollout that spans four formats in quick succession. On March 21, a day after the album release, BTS will perform at Seoul's Gwanghwamun Square. That show will be livestreamed globally via Netflix under the title BTS THE COMEBACK LIVE | ARIRANG, targeting viewers across Netflix's 190-plus country footprint who cannot attend in person. Six days later, on March 27, a documentary titled BTS: The Return, following the group's post-hiatus reunion and album creation, premieres separately.

The result is a compressed timeline: album on March 20, free concert and Netflix stream on March 21, documentary on March 27, and the cinema-broadcast world tour kicking off April 11. Each format feeds a different audience segment and revenue stream without cannibalizing the others.

Why K-pop concert films keep breaking box office records

The strategy of broadcasting live concerts and packaging concert footage for theatrical release has matured into an industry-wide playbook. The most recent proof point came from Stray Kids: The dominATE Experience, which opened to $19.9 million globally, driven by fans willing to pay premium prices for event-style screenings of a concert documentary. These releases offer labels and promoters a revenue line that traditional touring alone cannot reach: fans in cities without a tour stop still spend on tickets, and cinemas fill midweek slots with guaranteed audience turnout.

For BTS, the Arirang campaign represents a further step. Rather than treating the album, the tour, and the screenings as separate products, HYBE and BigHit Music have stitched them into one commercial arc. The box office, global streaming reach, and live production operate as a single coordinated release window. If the numbers from 2021-22 are any guide, the financial returns across these platforms will compound rather than compete.