Pop Mart and Sony Team Up for Labubu Live-Action Film With Paul King Directing

When Paul King appeared alongside Kasing Lung at the Hôtel du Grand Veneur in Paris on March 19, the reveal of a live-action/CGI Labubu film in development with Sony Pictures was the headline. For collectors, the more consequential detail was what that creative hire signals about the release pipeline likely to follow.

King's Paddington franchise is the most instructive precedent here. The 2014 film and its 2017 sequel generated licensing programs that outlasted their theatrical windows by years, anchored by the emotional specificity King brought to a character that could have been treated as pure nostalgia IP. Wonka followed the same pattern in 2023, with licensed merchandise surfacing months before the film opened. King builds characters people want as objects. Pop Mart has been doing exactly that with Labubu since Kasing Lung's 2015 picture book series The Monsters Trilogy.

The announcement landed during The Monsters 10th Anniversary World Tour's Paris stop, running through March 29 at the Hôtel du Grand Veneur. Pop Mart had already used the anniversary window to drop the MEGA Labubu 1000%, an 80cm ABS figure priced at $1,269.90 on the official site, and exhibition-exclusive plush variants that hit secondary markets within hours. Stacking a Sony film deal onto a year in which Pop Mart's Hong Kong-listed shares rose 64% suggests a coordinated expansion strategy, not a one-off licensing bet.

The creative team assembled is specific enough to read for tonal intent. King co-writes with Steven Levenson, Tony Award winner and the writer behind Dear Evan Hansen and Tick, Tick... BOOM!, whose specialty is emotionally driven stories about outsiders. That is a deliberate register for a nine-toothed forest elf rooted in Nordic mythology. Kasing Lung serves as executive producer. Producers Michael Schaefer and Wenxin She join King, with Sony's Brittany Morrissey overseeing the project. No casting or release timeline has been announced. The film remains in early development.

That early development phase is actually the most intelligence-rich window for collectors. On the Sonic the Hedgehog films, JAKKS Pacific's licensing deal surfaced in retail databases before any official press release, and figures broke street date ahead of trailers. Pop Mart's vertical structure, as both IP holder and primary retailer in the same company, compresses that timeline further and removes the traditional licensing-partner announcement as an advance signal. Film-tied variants could hit Pop Mart's own platform with minimal warning.

Here is what to track, in rough order of likely appearance. Watch Kasing Lung's personal channels first: his social media has historically previewed character redesigns before Pop Mart formalizes anything. Watch for a named third-party licensing partner, a plush manufacturer or regional distributor separate from Pop Mart's core blind-box line, which typically surfaces at Brand Licensing Expo or New York Toy Fair. Watch for The Monsters appearing in Sony's public licensing filings, which often precede press releases by weeks. Watch for theater-exclusive packaging language in Pop Mart's release notes, the kind of phrasing that appeared early in the Paddington UK cinema tie-in cycle. And watch for any production milestone announcement, whether a principal photography start date, a first-look image, or a teaser poster, because each of those has historically triggered a limited collab drop in comparable toy IP film timelines.

Morningstar analyst Jeff Zhang described the Sony deal as a milestone in Pop Mart's revenue diversification efforts while cautioning that the film is unlikely to move the company's stock valuation in the near term. For collectors, that cooling qualifier is actually useful signal: this is a long-play asset, and near-term drop pressure will be milestone-gated. The first real collectible opportunity arrives whenever the first production signal does.