Labubu Fans Split on Hollywood Movie: Excitement Meets Fear of Character Softening

The director who brought Paddington to Hollywood without destroying what fans loved about the bear has been handed the same challenge with a considerably sharper set of teeth. Paul King's attachment to the Sony Pictures and Pop Mart Labubu movie as director, producer, and co-writer should have quieted the fandom. Instead, it lit the reaction up.

When the project was formally announced in March at the Paris stop of The Monsters global exhibition tour, which marked the character's 10th anniversary, King and Labubu creator Kasing Lung appeared together to reveal the news. The live-action and CGI hybrid is still in early development, with King co-writing the script alongside Steven Levenson, the Tony-nominated playwright behind Dear Evan Hansen and the WGA-nominated writer of Tick, Tick... Boom!. On paper, the creative team is hard to argue with. The fandom argued with it anyway.

By April 6, fan commentary across social platforms had split along a fault line that most major IP adaptations eventually expose: the gap between those who see mainstream recognition as validation and those who see it as a threat. Call them expansionists and purists. The expansionists point to franchise potential the Paddington and Wonka models suggest: a well-executed family film unlocks waves of official product drops, limited-edition crossovers, and pop-up events that dwarf anything Pop Mart has done so far. The purists are tracking a different precedent, one where studios sand down the unsettling, jagged quality of a cult character until it is family-friendly but artistically unrecognizable.

What specifically alarms the purist camp is the fear of Hollywood rounding off the edges on a character whose appeal is built precisely on oddball ugliness. Labubu's jagged teeth, wide unblinking eyes, and general air of mischief are not incidental to its identity; they are the identity. Kasing Lung spent years developing The Monsters universe through picture books before How2Work brought the figures to life, and Pop Mart's 2019 acquisition turned what was already a devoted niche following into a global craze with over 300 figurines ranging from a $15 standard drop to a $960 mega edition. A 1.2-metre-tall mint-green Labubu sold for $170,000 at the first official Labubu auction in Beijing in June 2025. Collectors have built serious financial stakes around a character with a specific, non-cute aesthetic. A redesigned screen version is not a small-print concern.

The cautious optimism faction within that same collector community wants one thing above all: Lung's direct creative involvement throughout production, not just a credit and a Paris appearance. The logic is sound. Without Lung functioning as a genuine creative guardrail rather than a figurehead, the character's visual language and tone belong to whoever is writing the checks.

For collectors specifically, the film's progression into active production would almost certainly trigger a wave of promotional merchandise and licensing tie-ins. Film-era drops tend to generate sharp secondary market spikes during announcement windows, followed by volatility as supply catches up. Pieces from the pre-film era of any IP typically attract the strongest premium once a movie lands, a pattern worth noting while the project remains officially in early development.

King's Paddington films are frequently invoked as the gold standard for protecting an existing character's soul through a Hollywood adaptation. Whether the comparison holds depends almost entirely on how seriously Pop Mart and Sony treat Lung's creative authority as production moves forward.