Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
As a part of their upcoming comeback, EXO had a schedule for Dingo‘s popular feature Killing Voice, but it was reportedly abruptly cancelled and the reason behind that has caused a mess.
Citing an insider, SBS News reported that a member (not EXO-CBX) decided not to participate, and inferred it was related to contract issues with SM Entertainment.
SBS News reported that according to an industry insider, the reason for the last-minute cancellation was that one of the EXO members (hereafter referred to as “A”) had decided not to participate in the scheduled filming on June 29. The report also claimed that “A” was not Chen, Baekhyun, or Xiumin—who were recently caught up in a public legal dispute with SM Entertainment—but a different member.
The source told SBS News, “It is highly unusual for a shoot to be suddenly postponed due to [an artist] not participating when a comeback is imminent… according to my knowledge, it is not unrelated to EXO’s recent conflict [with SM Entertainment] over their contracts.”
The report goes on to say that while EXO-CBX reworked their contracts, the other members have not finished discussions with SME. It also mentions that the member has had previous disagreements with SME on the issue, which does remind me D.O. had a weird report about him leaving four years ago.
For their part, SME was quick to deny anything weird was going on, saying that EXO simply needed time to prepare.
SM Entertainment explained the cancellation by stating, “The [EXO] members thought that there were aspects [of their performance] that needed to be adjusted before their comeback, so we changed the schedule for ‘Killing Voice’ the day before filming. We decided on another filming date and have asked Dingo about it.”
Dingo also commented, saying they’re working on changing the filming day, and backed up SME’s excuse.
Dingo similarly commented, “We are currently checking on [changing] the filming schedule for the shoot to a different day.”
When asked about the reason for the change, Dingo replied, “As far as we are aware, the schedule was changed so that the artists could gain additional practice time for singing live, in order to present an even higher-quality live performance [through our] content.”
If this were another company or another group, then maybe you could doubt the report or downplay it, but it’s hard not to believe there’s fire here when there’s been a bunch of previous fires for similar reasons at the same place and now there’s smoke billowing yet again. And quite frankly, the excuse doesn’t even really make sense, as it’s hard to believe that veterans like EXO would have problems like this and I’ve never seen an issue with a Dingo filming addressed publicly before.
Of course, we may never find out if there’s anything to this if SME is able to get a handle on the situation behind-the-scenes, but it’s yet another sign that EXO is unhappy with their company and the terms of their contracts.
