By Isabel Miller
On 1 June 2026, Big Hit Music announced the North America leg of CORTIS’ <PUT YOUR PHONE DOWN>, with stops in Toronto, New York, Atlanta, Irving, Los Angeles. Each show is set to take place in the first half of August, after the tour’s initial unveiling in Incheon, South Korea, in July and before further stops take place in Seoul and Kanagawa, Japan, in late August and September.
<PUT YOUR PHONE DOWN> is CORTIS' first world tour, but not the group's first visit to North America. Over the past year, the group performed as part of the 2025 KOOM Festival in New York – which sold out – and hosted their own iHeartRadio LIVE event in Los Angeles in March 2026, restricted to an application system given the expected demand. Both appearances reflect the impact of CORTIS' debut mini album 'COLOR OUTSIDE THE LINES' in North America, which landed at No. 15 on the Billboard 200 – the highest entry for any fifth-generation K-pop artist.
Demand has only increased following the success of the group’s second mini album, ‘GREENGREEN’, released 4 May 2026. This release skyrocketed beyond CORTIS’ previous chart position in North America, landing at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart, with its viral pre-release “REDRED” establishing CORTIS as the first Korean boy group with a debut within the last five years to reach Spotify’s global rankings. Popularity on Spotify, predominantly used internationally as opposed to popular Korean music streaming service MelOn, proves a particularly international appeal - and an appeal that has been and remains rapidly accelerating in comparison to other fifth-generation K-pop acts when considering their 2025 debut.
For this reason, the choice to hire out theatre venues across North America is an interesting one - especially considering the 15,000 capacity of Inspire Arena which will host CORTIS’ concert in Incheon. Each of the five venues fall within the 3,500-6,000 range in terms of capacity, the largest being Los Angeles’ YouTube Theater which hosts a maximum of 6,000 depending on layout. During the CO ER Membership pre-sale this morning, despite being restricted only to those holding a purchasable CORTIS fan pass, this date sold out in under twenty minutes. One user on X shared a screenshot of the virtual Ticketmaster queue for the New York date, held at the Infosys Theater as part of Madison Square Garden, which displays a whopping 475,000 in line. Other screenshots shared on social media see several of the dates with queues breaching the 400,000 mark. An additional show was announced for San Francisco amongst the sales, but with a similar small capacity and the same major queues as well as its positioning in a new city, it doesn’t appear to be an attempt to meet demand.
It is evident that CORTIS could have sold out larger venues, and had the prior chart success to back such grand plans. So, why choose theatres? While current information does not suggest plans to enforce an explicit ‘no phone’ space at each of the concerts, the tour’s name reads as an imperative and aligns with the increasing number of artists who are requesting moments without cameras and with the full, present attention of concert crowds during live performances. The name itself implies intimacy, where fans experience the shows without the mediation of phone screens. It seems likely that Big Hit Music have therefore intentionally used exclusivity to steer CORTIS’ <PUT YOUR PHONE DOWN> tour in this direction.
With smaller venues and less attendees present, CORTIS will be physically closer to fans and more able to interact with them personally, emphasising that present-moment rush of contact over distant, large-scale sets. In an industry that is first and foremost a business, to prioritise a personal, perhaps unrecorded interaction over mass ticket sales seems unexpected and possibly even counterproductive. However, this will give the events a unique selling point instead. The approach carries a risk – exclusivity that feels curated for those inside the room can just as easily read as inaccessibility for everyone locked out of it.
CORTIS are already booked for far larger stages beyond this run – including KBS' Music Bank in Barcelona at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys on 12 September, with a capacity of 56,000. Whether the intimacy of <PUT YOUR PHONE DOWN> leaves a mark on how the group – or the wider industry – approaches live performance from here is worth watching.