How KPop Demon Hunters became everyone’s idol

Netflix’s mega-hit KPop Demon Hunters is now the streaming platform’s most popular movie of all time. But its ascendance as 2025’s surprise cultural phenomenon extends far beyond the animated movie itself.

It’s the music. It is the first soundtrack to have four songs in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time, with the single “Golden” reaching No. 1 for several weeks. The high-octane songs have the glossy production, catchy hooks, and charisma Korean pop is famous for.

The story follows girl group trio Huntr/x, who adore their fans as much as slurping ramyeon. But there’s a twist: they lead double lives to protect the world from demons through their music. Standing in their way are The Saja Boys. They’re demons masquerading as a human boy band, fighting back with infectious pop tunes and eight-pack abs to thwart Huntr/x’s critical mission.

That premise did not impress Sony, the studio that made the movie but ultimately passed distribution to Netflix.

One of the reasons why the movie is so special is that it honors k-pop’s status as one of the world’s most popular genres, said Rebecca Sun, author of the Quiet Part Substack about cultural news and criticism. K-pop groups like Blackpink, BTS, TWICE, and NewJeans don’t always get as much love from American tastemakers, even though their music and presence is literally everywhere.

“I found that every single project that highlights some sort of historically excluded culture or some subculture,” Sun said, “they always are more successful if they just throw you in there rather than attempt to handhold you in some cheesy way.”

Below is an excerpt of a conversation between Today, Explained host Noel King and Sun, edited for length and clarity. There’s more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Where did this movie come from? How did Netflix get a hold of it?

So this is another brilliant part of the narrative.

The movie is completely produced by Sony Pictures Animation, which is the studio that made the Oscar-winning Spiderverse movies. And the two directors, Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, had deals with Sony. So it was completely developed in-house within Sony. They pitched Sony’s distribution arm and they passed. Sony said, yeah, I don’t think we’re going to put this movie out ourselves.

Simultaneously, Sony had a first-look deal with Netflix. This was a deal that was struck around the time of the pandemic where Netflix said, “Hey, we promise that we will finance at least one or two of your movies a year. We’ll put them on our streaming service and we’ll just buy them for you. So you make them, we will pay, we reimburse you for the entire production budget and the rest is history.”

And Sony was not the only entity to underestimate this movie. You actually wrote on your Substack that you ignored an invitation from Netflix to prescreen this movie. Why? What was going through your head?

Okay, so first of all, I cannot compare myself anywhere to the level of import as a player in this universe.

To me, you are.

Thank you. But this is what was going through my head: As somebody who’s been covering entertainment for a very long time, I had been tracking K-pop projects in Hollywood for a decade. Like, Hollywood has been trying to make K-pop themed projects since at least 2015, which is the earliest known project that I could find. And so it was more my cynicism about the industry’s historic failure to make a successful scripted K-pop feature.

But look, it wasn’t just me. Because merchandising — you know they tried, Netflix tried going to merch retailers to say, hey, do you want to partner with us on this movie we have coming out, KPop Demon Hunters, and all the merchandisers passed.

So yeah, whatever toy companies passed on making stuffed Derpy tigers, they could have made so much money this summer.

But this raises a very interesting question, right, because I don’t know a ton about K-pop, but I do know that Korean music and Korean movies have had stunning global appeal for years now. Why, to this point, was nobody able to pull off this type of movie and why did this movie hit, do you think?

One commonality I found in all of the K-pop projects that never made it to the finish line was they were all written from the point of view of what I call the outsider’s gaze. So there were several projects where the protagonist was a Westerner, and in most cases a white character, who was imported to Korea to the K-pop scene for some reason. It’s always been this fish out of water trope. And I think that that comes from studio executives who themselves are not K-pop fans, but have just read in the papers that K-pop is big. They were like, let’s do a K-pop thing, but let’s make sure that this exotic thing makes sense to people. They’re trying to sort of reverse-engineer its popularity.

Whereas KPop Demon Hunters, what’s interesting about it is that it takes place in a universe where [it’s] just assumed that every single person in the world, every single character in the movie is obsessed with K-pop. Every single person from kids to old men at the sauna listen to K-pop, participate in the subculture’s rituals, and there’s no explanation.

I was talking to some friends, they are 4 and 6 years old, and they were telling me how much they love KPop Demon Hunters. And I was talking to their mom at one point over their heads. And we were saying like, “Okay, we get it.”

How long do you think this movie is going to dominate for? At what point does the obsession fade?

That’s a question to ask some kids.