10-07-2025
'Love Island' watch parties are taking over and put sporting events to shame, bars say: It's 'a whole different animal'
A hot new bombshell has entered the villa: "Love Island USA" watch parties are shaking up bar scenes across the country.
For those unfamiliar: The reality dating series, now in its seventh season for U.S. contestants, follows a group of 20-something singles in a villa in Fiji and is filmed in nearly real-time over six weeks. The show drops six new episodes on Peacock each week, including a recap episode on Saturdays.
It's a time-consuming show to keep up with, but savvy businesses are making the most of the phenomenon by hosting watch parties for eager fans.
The crowds at The Palm & The Pine in Los Angeles are so big that staff refer to each Tuesday showing as "Super Bowl Tuesday," says Colin Magalong, 30, part-owner of the bar.
Revenue on Tuesdays, typically the bar's slowest night, has grown five-fold in recent weeks, Magalong says.
The Palm & The Pine began hosting events in February for shows like "The Traitors," "Survivor" and "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives" in partnership with Maddy Biebel of Reality Bar, which organizes reality TV watch parties around LA.
But "Love Island" has taken on a life of its own.
June was a record-breaking month for The Palm & The Pine thanks to "Love Island": The bar hired four new staffers, tips are up and foot traffic to the whole block has seen a boost, Magalong says. It's a meaningful lift for the barely 1-year-old bar, and given businesses in the area have struggled to recover from the pandemic, Hollywood strikes and devastating wildfires.
For his Hollywood bar in particular, the events "really revitalized the happy hour that has been taken away with working from home and office buildings going vacant," Magalong says.
The strategy recently brought in a group of colleagues from a nearby office to the bar for the first time; the four women spent the last month watching "Love Island" on their own and gathering at the office each morning to discuss.
The event, which they found from Reality Bar's Instagram page, was their first time watching the show together. "When I'm reacting, I'm at home reacting by myself," one woman told CNBC Make It. "The morning debrief is cool, but in the moment is so much better."
Elsewhere in LA, country bar Eastwood hosted their first "Love Island" watch party on Friday, June 27, with the help of Reality Bar and sponsorship from the clothing brand Cider.
Nearly 350 people packed the 400-person capacity bar, says Kayla Jennings-Rivera, 28, Eastwood's director of marketing and events. "We were blown away," she says.
The surge in traffic has been a relief for the bar, Jennings-Rivera says, especially this summer as ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have caused safety concerns for Latino residents, who account for roughly 1.8 million people in the city, according to Census data.
At Eastwood, "a lot of our regulars are Hispanic, and ICE has impacted the comfortability of people being able to leave their homes and go out and enjoy themselves," Jennings-Rivera says. "So we've seen our regulars slow down and ultimately hope that they feel safe to come back as soon as possible."
She hopes that by reaching new customers through recent watch parties, the bar can bring in additional sales during a financially precarious time.
Further, she says more customers today are looking for community spaces rather than just places to imbibe, given that Gen Zers and millennials are drinking less alcohol than prior decades.
"Community is now more talked about than ever before," Jennings-Rivera says. As for the watch parties, "there's definitely something different about being in a group [and] just screaming at the television together," she says.
PKL Social, a sports bar with pickleball courts in Houston, has hosted watch parties for sporting events and TV shows alike, "but Love Island has been a whole different animal," says co-owner Jason Mok, 40.
Viewership was slow to pick up at the bar until two weeks ago, Mok says, "then next thing you know, the 30 to 50 [regulars] became 200, 250." Thursday and Friday events are standing-room only, and some visitors arrive at 5:30 p.m. to get good seats for the 8 p.m. start time.
Mok says he's had to pull staff from his other nearby restaurants to manage the influx of crowds. The phenomenon is unlike anything he's seen in his eight years in the restaurant and bar industry. "I've dealt with the Astros making the World Series and big Super Bowls, but this is bigger," Mok says.
Abigail Dooley and Remi Miyake knew they'd have a hit on their hands hosting "Love Island" watch parties where they work at The Malt House in New York City's Greenwich Village.
They pitched the idea to their boss Kevin O'Hanlon, 34, who gave the greenlight to promote an event on TikTok. From there, O'Hanlon says, "it just went through the roof."
Viewers came ready to cheer on their favorite couples, jeer at the ones they love to hate, and react to twists in the show's dramatic re-couplings. "They're loud," O'Hanlon says of the high-energy crowds. "They put a lot of the sporting events that we've done to shame."
They hosted their first watch party on June 24, more than halfway through the season, and turned their 75-seat dining area into a communal viewing space that can fit up to 120.
Spots to watch the finale, which airs Sunday on Peacock at 9 p.m. EST, were fully booked more than two weeks in advance, he adds.
"You typically find, especially in this city, that whenever everybody can get behind something, they go really big," O'Hanlon says.
O'Hanlon hopes that many of the first-time customers who've learned about The Malt House from "Love Island" will make their way back after the show wraps.
"In a city like New York, where there are so many bars and restaurants that people can go to, and we're constantly competing with everybody around us, you've got to do something that helps you stand out," he says. "And this has definitely done that for us."
