Labubu Movie: What Was Labubu? What Is It Now? What Will It Be?

In March 2026, at the Paris stop of a global exhibition commemorating the tenth anniversary of The Monsters, Chinese collectibles company Pop Mart and Sony Pictures Entertainment confirmed that a Labubu film was in the works.

The film will be a hybrid of live action and computer-generated animation, with Paul King, the filmmaker behind Paddington and Wonka, attached to direct and produce; a screenplay written by the character's creator Kasing Lung and Steven Levenson; and no release date has been set.

Most readers interpret the headline as entertainment news. To a business school, it is more useful: a live case study of how a small designer toy grows into a multibillion-dollar intellectual property before attempting the far more difficult task of becoming a long-term entertainment franchise. This article treats the announcement as an analytical prompt, not a press release.

It asks three questions sequentially. What was Labubu like before the world waited for it? What does Labubu represent now, both financially and culturally? And what will Labubu be like once the novelty wears off and the film is released?

Each question corresponds to a discipline at the heart of business education, ranging from consumer psychology to intellectual property strategy, global supply chains, and valuation under uncertainty.

What Was Labubu? The Origins of an Ugly Cute Character

Labubu began as a drawing and not a product. The character was created in 2015 by Hong Kong illustrator Kasing Lung as part of a picture book series called The Monsters, in which he populates a fantasy world with elf-like creatures inspired by Nordic mythology. Labubu is a forest sprite with pointed ears, a mischievous expression, and a row of sharp teeth.

The face represents the design strategy. It is neither conventionally cute nor frightening, but rather deliberately balanced between the two, an esthetic that commentators later dubbed "ugly cuteness," and that tension is precisely what made the design memorable rather than generic.

For several years, Labubu remained a niche item known primarily to designer toy collectors. The commercial turning point came from a licensing agreement with Pop Mart, a retailer founded in Beijing by Wang Ning in 2010 that had built its business on a unique and unusual mechanism: the blind box. Under this model, a figure is sold in sealed packaging, so the buyer has no idea which variant of a series they've purchased until they open it.

Pop Mart applied that mechanism to a stable of illustrated characters, the most well-known of which were Labubu, Molly, Skullpanda, Crybaby, and Dimoo. What is striking and instructive is the duration of the incubation.

The character existed for nearly a decade before the craze, serving as a reminder that overnight cultural phenomena are rare and that assets that suddenly appear valuable were typically built slowly and quietly in the past.

What Is Labubu Now? Anatomy of a Global Consumer Phenomenon

By 2025, the Labubu Labubu had evolved from a toy into a phenomenon, which celebrities such as Rihanna, Dua Lipa, and Lisa of Blackpink contributed to by attaching the plush charms to luxury handbags. To understand what Labubu is now, consider three layers: the psychological mechanism that drives purchase, the financial scale that resulted, and the geography of where that demand is actually located, including Jakarta.

The Mechanism: Blind Boxes and Variable Reward

The blind box is worth pausing on because it serves as the model's engine. In behavioral economics, uncertain rewards have a greater impact on behavior than fixed rewards, a principle that also underpins gambling, lotteries, and slot machines. When a buyer does not know whether a box contains a common figure or a rare hidden edition, each purchase carries a small charge of anticipation, and this intermittent reinforcement encourages repeat purchases in ways that a predictable transaction never could. Academic research on the blind box economy has identified precisely this pattern, linking the mystery reward mechanism to emotional value, impulsive spending, and habit formation among younger consumers (The Blind Box Economy, 2025).

Two additional dynamics enhance the effect. The first is the secondary market. When resellers can sell rare hidden editions at high prices, regular purchases start to feel like small speculative bets. One mixed-method study of Pop Mart resale activity discovered that scarcity-driven hidden editions and collaborations drove some items' prices to many times their original value, resulting in bubble-like characteristics such as rapid appreciation and sharp volatility (Understanding the Speculative Bubble, 2025).

The second dynamic is social signaling. A Labubu clipped to a bag is more than just an object; it's a statement of taste and belonging that transforms private consumption into public identity and feeds the cycle through platforms where that identity is expressed.

Pop Mart reinforces all of these ideas with a membership program that, in the first half of 2025, accounted for the vast majority of sales and had a repeat purchase rate of more than 50% (Moonfox, 2025).

The Financial Scale

The data explains why analysts, not just fans, are now watching this character. Pop Mart reported 2025 revenue of 37.12 billion yuan, or roughly 5.4 billion US dollars, an 185 percent increase over the previous year, while net profit attributable to owners increased to around 12.8 billion yuan and gross margin expanded to 72.1% (Reuters, 2026; China Daily, 2026). The Monsters series, led by Labubu, generated 14.16 billion yuan in 2025, up 365.7 percent, becoming the company's first franchise to exceed ten billion yuan in annual revenue and accounting for nearly 38% of the total (China Daily, 2026).

Plush products, the format most associated with Labubu, became the company's largest category, worth 18.71 billion yuan (Ichongqing, 2026).

By the end of the year, Pop Mart had over 600 stores and thousands of automated robot shops worldwide, with a market value approaching $40 billion, surpassing the established American toymaker Mattel. This juncture is the point at which a plastic and plush character begins to resemble a multifaceted consumer goods company.

The Jakarta and Southeast Asia Dimension

For a Jakarta reader, the phenomenon is not unfamiliar. Southeast Asia has been one of the most rapid growth areas of the Labubu boom, thanks to young populations, rising disposable income, and dense digital networks in Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. As early as 2023, the regional trendy toy market was estimated to be worth around twenty billion yuan, with Chinese brands accounting for the vast majority of it and penetration rates remaining low enough to indicate significant room for growth (EqualOcean, 2024). Pop Mart has moved accordingly. It opened its largest Indonesian store at Kota Kasablanka in Jakarta, its first Bali outlet outside of Kuta Beach in June 2025, and, as a further indication of the country's importance, added Indonesia to its manufacturing network alongside Mexico and Cambodia (Marketing Interactive, 2025; PR Newswire, 2025; Reuters, 2026b). A student in Central Jakarta can thus study this case and then walk into a physical example of it, a rare luxury in business education.

The Cracks

A clear analysis must also identify the fragility. Growth slowed noticeably in the fourth quarter of 2025, and while the annual results were outstanding, they fell just short of the highest market expectations. The reaction was severe: Pop Mart shares fell by roughly a fifth in a single session following the results and remained well below their August 2025 peak, wiping out tens of billions of Hong Kong dollars in market value within days (CNBC, 2026; BigGo Finance, 2026).

Three structural concerns drive that volatility. The company still relies heavily on a single character, so any loss of interest has a magnified impact. Counterfeiting, also known as the Lafufu problem, threatens both revenue and brand equity. And the scarcity that drove resale premiums began to ease as Pop Mart increased monthly plush output to around thirty million units, cooling the secondary market that had fueled the hype (Manufacturing Digital, 2026).

Success, in other words, carried the seeds of its normalization.

What Will Labubu Be? The Labubu Movie and the Disney Playbook

This context frames how we should read the Labubu movie. The film is not a vanity project, but rather the clearest indication yet of a strategic shift: an attempt to transform a viral toy into a long-lasting entertainment property. Wang Ning has described the film as a warm and touching story about Labubu entering the human world, emphasizing that the company is creating a larger ecosystem of theme parks, products, and content rather than making a film for its own sake (Xinhua, 2026).

Executives have openly used the Disney playbook, which entails extending a small number of beloved characters across films, parks, and merchandise so that each channel reinforces the other. The Labubu film, thus, joins a Beijing theme park, a planned European headquarters in London, a collaboration with Sanrio, the owner of Hello Kitty, and a tie-in with the FIFA World Cup as instruments of the same plan (Reuters, 2026; Guangming Online, 2026).

The timing is based on a genuine structural tailwind. The market for so-called kidulting toys, which are products designed for adults who buy for nostalgia, stress relief, and self-expression, was valued at approximately 38.71 billion dollars in 2025 and is expected to reach 67.86 billion dollars by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of nearly 12% (The Business Research Company, 2026).

Adults are now the largest and fastest-growing segment of the collectibles market, and the global toy industry as a whole grew 7% in 2025 due to what one research firm called the Joy Factor, the convergence of entertainment, collectability, and emotional engagement, with licensed products gaining their largest market share ever (Verified Market Research, 2025; Circana, 2026). In that sense, a film that strengthens emotional attachment to Labubu is a sound bet on the direction of discretionary spending.

However, the strategic question remains unresolved, which is precisely why it is worth teaching. Can a character born as a viral moment survive the transition into a long-lasting franchise, or will the film arrive after the initial surge of interest has passed?

The marketplace is divided. Some analysts predict only modest growth for Labubu in 2026, questioning the long-term viability of any single property, although the company has guided for growth of at least 20% and is racing to diversify its portfolio beyond a single face.

The Labubu film is a bet on longevity, and the result will be a real-world verdict on whether emotional intellectual property can be manufactured to last.

Why the Labubu Movie Belongs in a Business Classroom

The Labubu film is almost an ideal teaching case at Raffles Jakarta, an international design and business school on Jalan M.H. Thamrin, because it refuses to confine itself to a single subject. It is also a consumer psychology study because the blind box mechanism serves as a textbook example of variable reward and emotional branding.

It is a study in intellectual property strategy because it demonstrates how a licensed character is monetized across multiple formats. It is a study in global operations because it focuses on supply chains that have now reached Jakarta.

And it's a valuation and risk case study, because the disparity between record results and a falling share price teaches us how markets price sustainability over history.

These are the competencies that the school's business programs are designed to develop. The Business Administration program combines core management skills with digital commerce, contemporary marketing, and a strategic management capstone that examines exactly this type of integrated case (Raffles Jakarta, 2026a).

The Master of Business Administration, which is delivered in English over one year with intakes throughout the year, expands on the analysis with modules in Managerial Economics; Marketing Management and Strategy; and Ethics, Corporate Governance, and Social Responsibilities, the latter of which addresses the uncomfortable debate about how much the blind box resembles gambling (Raffles Jakarta, 2026b).

The purpose of a case like Labubu is not to commemorate a toy. It is to provide students with a phenomenon that is large enough, current enough, and hotly debated enough that reasonable analysts still disagree on how it will end.

What Was, What Is, and What Will Be

Labubu was a patient response to the myth of overnight success: a 2015 drawing that waited nearly ten years for its opportunity. Labubu is now a consumer psychology assessment and a demonstration that emotional value, engineered through uncertainty and scarcity, can generate billions of dollars in revenue and a valuation that outperforms century-old rivals, as well as all of the fragility that such concentration implies. What Labubu will become is still uncertain, and the Labubu movie is Pop Mart's wager on the outcome.

For a business school, the honest position is not to predict the ending but to prepare students to read the arc, because the frameworks that explain Labubu, from behavioral economics to intellectual property strategy to the discipline of valuing an uncertain future, are the same frameworks that will be carried forward into every subsequent phenomenon.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there really a Labubu movie?Yes. Pop Mart and Sony Pictures Entertainment announced a Labubu feature film in March 2026, unveiled in Paris during a global exhibition marking ten years of The Monsters. The project is a hybrid of live action and computer-generated animation and remains in early development.

Who is making the Labubu movie? Pop Mart and Sony Pictures Entertainment are developing the Labubu movie. Paul King, known for Paddington and Wonka, is attached to direct and produce; the character's creator, Kasing Lung, serves as executive producer; and Steven Levenson is co-writing the screenplay.

When will the Labubu movie be released?No release date has been announced. As of early 2026, the film was described as being in early development with a preliminary script, so a cinema release is likely to be some way off.

Why did Labubu become so popular?Labubu became popular through a combination of a distinctive ugly-cute design, the blind box purchasing mechanism that rewards repeat buying, high-profile celebrity exposure, and an active resale market that turned collecting into a form of social signaling and speculation.

Is the Labubu boom sustainable? The issue is genuinely contested. Pop Mart posted record 2025 results, yet its shares fell sharply afterwards because investors worry about heavy reliance on a single character, counterfeiting, and cooling resale prices, even as the company expands its ecosystem to build durability.

What can business students learn from Labubu?Business students can use Labubu to study consumer psychology, emotional branding, intellectual property monetization, global supply chains, and how financial markets value the sustainability of growth rather than past performance alone.

Arman POUREISA

Marketing Manager

Raffles Indonesia

References

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