During a recent episode of the Steve-O’s Wild Ride podcast, Paul Stanley teased KISS fans about avatar shows.
“I had mixed feelings about showing those [initial images], because they’re so early on,” the rocker said of avatars. “They look nothing like that. I mean, the avatars… look like us. And I think the idea [for the preview video] was really just to show people that we’re going to move on and continue, but it won’t be like that.”
Stanley continued, “[W]hat we’re putting together with George Lucas and Pophouse… is an immersive experience that you’ll come to and there’ll be heat and fire and wind and things flying around. … I would say it’s Cirque du Soleil meets ‘Star Wars’… and a KISS concert. So… it’s going to be amazing.”
In a talk with Billboard’s Behind The Setlist podcast last month, Stanley said KISS avatar shows are cooler than ABBA’s. He explained, “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. People just are thrilled with it. I took my wife last month, and I had seen it last year.”
Paul added, “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 further noted. “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.”
Stanley shared, “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.”
“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,” he discussed.
Pophouse Entertainment, started by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, will use new technology to make digital versions of KISS. They showed a preview at KISS’s last show in New York in December 2023.