In a new chat with Billboard’s Behind The Setlist podcast, Paul Stanley said KISS avatar shows are cooler than ABBA’s.
“Pophouse had done a great job with the ABBA show that runs outside of London and is sold out for three years and it’s really terrific, terrific entertainment,” the rocker said. “People just are thrilled with it. I took my wife last month, and I had seen it last year.”
Stanley continued, “So Pophouse understood what we wanted to do and that what we wanna create is something that’s state of the art today. Now, mind you that the ABBA show is an older technology because technology moves ahead at an exponential rate. So by the time that show started to be presented, there was new technology.”
“So we’ll be working with ILM [Industrial Light & Magic], with George Lucas’s company, and we’re creating something that’s not a concert,” the musician clarified. “The idea of a hologram, and it’s not a hologram, but that term seems to get thrown around a lot, but the idea of a simulated concert is not what we wanna do.”
Paul then noted, “Frankly, I would find that that boring. I mean, how long can you go, ‘Gee, that looks just like an amp.’ So what we’re creating is an immersive experience that KISS fans will love and people who have never been exposed to KISS or might not like certain aspects of the band will have to see.”
He added, “It’s a must-see go-to experience. So it’s beyond anything that anyone else has contemplated. The whole idea, again, of doing a simulated concert is — that’s the dark ages to us.”
Pophouse Entertainment, started by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, will use new technology to create digital KISS versions. They showed a preview at KISS’s last New York show in December 2023. Still, some fans criticized the avatars.
“We wanna create something that’s a go-to and a must-see for everybody. KISS fans will love it, but other people who could care less about KISS will wanna see it. It’s going to be mind-boggling,” Stanley defended the band in June.
He also said, “It’s KISS and Cirque du Soleil and everything you can imagine on steroids. But it will really cross that bridge of what’s real and what’s not, and combine the two… It will be incredible. The idea that we’re gonna simulate a live show — leave that to somebody else. We have no desire to do that. We wanna create KISS, which is something that breaks the rules, not lives within ’em.”
Gene Simmons revealed in June that the project will cost around $200 million. He also explained that it would be a major investment to create impressive digital versions of the band.