You've Heard Of The Infamous "7-Year Curse" But What About The "Queendom 2" Curse?

It has been 3 years since the K-Pop competition show Queendom 2 first aired. At the time, the girl groups that participated on the show — LOONA, Cosmic Girls (WJSN), Kep1er, VIVIZ, and Brave Girls (as well as soloist Hyolyn) — were all doing fairly well in their careers with varying levels of success.

With shows like Queendom and Kingdom, the groups that participate on them are usually hoping to get more well-established in the K-Pop industry by showing their performance prowess on a large platform. Therefore, the groups that participated on Queendom 2 were all expected to see a positive impact from their hard work!

But now, it seems like pretty much the exact opposite has happened. Starting with the fate of Brave Girls. Just one year after the show, it was announced that all four members would be leaving their label, Brave Entertainment, after the expiration of their contracts.

Despite their boom in popularity in 2021 with the sudden success of their 2017 hit “Rollin’”, Brave Girls wasn’t able to ride on the unexpected opportunity, seemingly due to poor management on their label’s part. And though they were praised for their performances on Queendom 2, it just wasn’t enough to make a huge positive impact. The group rebranded to BB Girls when they left Brave Entertainment, but in the end, member Youjoung decided to leave the group to focus on her personal activities.

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Another group that participated on the show that has had trouble since is LOONA. Between Chuu being suddenly removed from the group and several members filing to suspend their contracts with their label, BlockBerry Entertainment, among other issues, the future for LOONA as a group seemed bleak at the time.

Following a series of lawsuits against Blockberry Creative, the LOONA members are now all spread out within the industry. YeoJin, Go Won, HyeJu, HyunJin, and ViVi signed with CTDENM and redebuted as Loossemble, but their contract only lasted a year and four months before they left that agency too. HeeJin, Kim Lip, JinSoul, Choerry, and HaSeul signed with Modhaus and redebuted as ARTMS. Yves signed with Paix Per Mil and debuted as a soloist.

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Out of all of the groups that participated on Queendom 2, it seemed like Cosmic Girls, who placed first overall, should have seen a drastic rise in their popularity after their time on the show. However, while they did have higher album sales for Sequence, which came out a few months after the show, fans of the group thought Starship Entertainment didn’t take advantage of their win as much as they could have.

While WJSN held their concert tour right after their Queendom 2 win alongside a comeback, Starship then went essentially dark, essentially only announcing members’ departures from the group. On March 3, 2023, they announced that Xuanyi, Cheng Xiao, and Meiqi would leave the group following the expiration of their contracts. They also announced on the same day that Luda and Dawon would be leaving the agency. Yeonjung has also mentioned there are currently no plans of a group comeback, further diminishing hopes that the group will reunite.

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Kep1er is a bit of a different story, given that they were already a temporary group to begin with. Their disbandment was originally set for July 2024.

However, it seems that their time on Queendom 2 might not have had a huge impact on their career, at least not positively. With each of the three albums they’ve released, their sales numbers have gone down: First Impact, released before the show, sold around 396k units; Doublast, their first album after Queendom 2, sold about 353k; Troubleshooter made about 267k sales; Lovestruck! had 195k, and Magic Hour had 141k. Despite the drop in album sales, the parent companies of the members did see enough potential within the group to agree to an extension of their project group contract. However, members Mashiro and Yeseo did not stay, and instead returned to their parent company, 143 Entertainment, to debut in Madein.

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VIVIZ seems to be the only group that came out of Queendom 2 unscathed. Of course, they did already go through the sudden and unexpected disbandment of their former group, GFRIEND, before they went on Queendom 2, so hopefully they’ve already had their share of that kind of heartbreak! All three members renewed their contracts with BPM in August 2024.

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