Just after lunchtime on a Saturday in November, a sea of purple braids bobs in unison, barely clearing the tops of the movie-theater seats behind them. The high-pitched voices emerging from the violet-coiffed children sing softly at first, crescendoing as the animated character they’re dressed as bares her soul: “No more hiding/ Now I’m shining/ Like I’m born to be!” But it’s not just the kids whose attention is rapt. When the next song begins, a father announces, “This one’s my favorite,” and a few minutes later is telling his restless little one they can’t leave yet. “No,” he says, pointing at the animal sidekicks onscreen. “This is really funny.”
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The scene at this Brooklyn theater, during the second sing-along event staged since Netflix released KPop Demon Hunters on June 20, laid bare what has made the movie the streamer’s most watched title of all time. Not since Frozen in 2013 has an animated film been so omnipresent in our lives. Backed by an alternately catchy and profound pop soundtrack, the 95-minute Seoul-set film tells the story of a K-pop trio called Huntr/x (pronounced Huntrix) whose members, Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, protect the world from demons who feed on human souls. They use their music to strengthen the honmoon, an invisible shield that keeps the demons out. The secret that lead singer Rumi is hiding beneath her couture ensembles—that her skin bears the patterns of her demon father—gives way to a nuanced message of self-love over shame.
The movie’s appeal seems self-evident in retrospect: cool girls in sick costumes, singing full-throated anthems about self-acceptance that also happen to be instant earworms, matched by inventive, vibrant visuals. And all those elements floated in on the still rising wave of Korean cultural exports enjoying global popularity, from BTS to Blackpink, Parasite to Squid Game.
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But its success was hardly inevitable. KPop Demon Hunters is an original story at a time of conservative reliance on familiar IP. It’s an animated film at a moment when nonfranchise animation is flagging at the box office. (Elio, released in theaters the same day Demon Hunters hit Netflix, had the lowest opening weekend in Pixar history.) It leans heavily on specific cultural references and lacks bankable headlining stars. And it was no small risk, with a reported budget of around $100 million. While everyone who had a part in making it hoped it would find its audience, none foresaw just how big it would become.
In the 10 years since Netflix began releasing original films, not one has been as watched as much as Demon Hunters, which surpassed 325 million views in its first three months and hit the top 10 in 93 countries. Its soundtrack reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and has been streamed 8.3 billion times. Breakout hit “Golden” spent 17 weeks atop the Billboard Global 200 chart.
As chairman of Netflix film Dan Lin explains, “I care about: Has it cut through to the culture? Are people talking about it? Do they want to see a live experience? Do they want to see a sequel? Do they want to buy a costume?” The answer to all of these is yes. In August, the first time Netflix showed the movie in theaters, it sold out more than 1,300 screenings across three continents and marked the streamer’s first time leading the box office, with an estimated $18 million. A sequel was announced in November, the same week the movie landed three Grammy nominations including Song of the Year, and on Dec. 8, it received three Golden Globe nominations.
Celebrities from Andy Samberg to Kelly Clarkson declared their love for the movie, while Fortnite began allowing players to purchase Demon Hunters “skins” for their characters. Novak Djokovic danced to its infectious track “Soda Pop” after winning a quarterfinal match at the U.S. Open. Parenting guru Dr. Becky Kennedy created a guide to watching the movie with kids and promoted it to her 3.4 million Instagram followers. Cast members performed on The Tonight Show and in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and made a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live, in a sketch in which host Bad Bunny berates his friends for failing to grasp the movie’s brilliance.
Google’s top five most-searched Halloween costumes were all characters from the film—only most of this year’s trick-or-treaters weren’t sporting Netflix-sanctioned costumes. In order for that to have happened, the licensed manufacturing partners would have had to bet on the movie months before its release. Similarly, the fruit of Netflix’s “unprecedented” October deal with Mattel and Hasbro to produce branded toys and games won’t hit shelves until months after the holidays. It’s not for lack of trying, says Lin. “The buyers felt like it was too niche.”
“Niche” is a comically quaint descriptor now. Says Lin: “I don’t think anyone in the world will not know what KPop Demon Hunters is.”
After over a decade in animation, director Maggie Kang figured that if she wanted to work on a film rooted in Korean culture, she might have to pitch it herself. KPop Demon Hunters is so personal that her daughter was named for its protagonist—no, not the other way around—and Kang cast her to voice young Rumi in the film. (She now proudly introduces herself with the origin story for her name.)
For Kang, the demons of the movie’s title preceded the K-pop element, despite the fact that she’s a self-professed “OG K-pop fan.” As a kid, she’d been terrified of the jeoseung saja of Korean folklore, Grim Reaper–esque ushers into the afterlife. At first, they seemed too scary a concept for a kids’ movie, but her then-future niece’s love of Maleficent made her reconsider, and those mythological figures became the Saja Boys: demons disguised as an impossibly hot boy band intent on stealing Huntr/x’s fans, one soul at a time.
While the crux of the story hasn’t changed since its inception, the film began with a smaller budget, darker tone, and slightly older-skewing target demo. It was Kristine Belson, president of Sony Pictures Animation—which produced the film before selling the rights to Netflix in 2021—who persuaded Kang to aim bigger and brought Chris Applehans, who directed 2021’s China-set Wish Dragon, on board to direct alongside her. Lin, who came to Netflix after the film had been acquired, says the filmmakers were striving for a look that viewers had “never seen anything like before,” as when The Lego Movie (which he produced) or Sony’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse introduced new visual language to the world of animation. KPop Demon Hunters counts among its influences the choreographed gloss of K-pop visuals, the softly lit feel of Korean dramas, and the hand-drawn style of Japanese anime.
Then there’s the title. “We constantly thought to ourselves that we would think of a cooler title,” recalls Applehans. “I think it ended up serving us well. It invites the question of: ‘What in the world do these two things have to do with each other?’”
Still, when Demon Hunters was released, Applehans was not prepared for “the intensity of the feedback, the speed and the specificity of it.” Scrolling on Instagram and TikTok in the first 48 hours, he saw Saja Boys thirst traps, but also “comments with 100,000 likes about identity and fame and generational trauma,” he recalls. “I remember just texting with Maggie: ‘Whoa. The people who have found this really, really love it.’”
The music credits for KPop Demon Hunters read like a who’s who of the K-pop world. There’s Black Label co-founder Teddy Park, who has produced and co-written for Blackpink, and producer Lindgren (BTS, behemoth girl group Twice). Songwriter Ejae, who provides the singing voice for Rumi and co-wrote five of the album’s seven original songs, spent more than a decade as a trainee for SM Entertainment before turning to songwriting. She, in turn, recruited fellow songwriter Andrew Choi, who was ultimately cast as the singing voice of Saja Boys leader Jinu. (Each member of Huntr/x and the Saja Boys is voiced by both an actor and a singer.)
It follows, then, that K-pop fans were among the first to spread the gospel of the movie. They were joined by members of the anime fandom, which is estimated to include more than 1 billion devotees outside of Japan and China, with a global market of approximately $23 billion in 2023. Both fandoms feature two key ingredients for virality: they are global and extremely online.
Korean cultural exports, or hallyu, have enjoyed a steadily growing audience abroad since the late 1990s. But in recent years, that footprint has exploded: groups like BTS and Blackpink began incorporating English into their songs and collaborating with the likes of Lady Gaga and Megan Thee Stallion. Netflix became a prominent home to Korean dramas like Crash Landing on You, announcing plans to invest $2.5 billion in the country from 2023 to 2027. (KPop Demon Hunters enlisted K-drama stars like Business Proposal’s Ahn Hyo-seop, who voices Jinu alongside Choi, and Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun as demon king Gwi-Ma.) To Kyong Yoon, a professor at the University of British Columbia and co-author of Transnational Hallyu: The Globalization of Korean Digital and Popular Culture, the success of KPop Demon Hunters signals “a new phase of the Korean Wave.” This latest surge, he says, is still “controlled by Korean content creators or industry, but it’s more diversified and more diasporic.”
Though some uncertainty hung in the air about how the film would be received in Korea given its mostly North American production, Ji-young Yoo, who provides the speaking voice for bubbly rapper and lyricist Zoey and has spent the fall filming a project in Seoul, calls the reception there “mind-blowing.” “Every time I’m out on the street, at least one KPop Demon Hunters song is playing in a store or restaurant. These two guys were jogging down the Han River to ‘Takedown.’ There are collabs with bakeries and ramen brands. It’s like it can’t possibly get any bigger, and then it does.”
The K-pop establishment, too, was quick to embrace the film. Twice covered “Takedown” as the album’s lead single. In July, Jung Kook of BTS sang along to “Soda Pop” and “Your Idol” during a livestream and told fans that he cried watching the movie. Netflix’s X bio was briefly updated to reflect the massiveness of this endorsement: “jungkook watched kpop demon hunters.”
The movie presents a largely favorable depiction of K-pop fandom, revolving around Huntr/x’s symbiotic relationship with its supporters. “The way Rumi, Mira, and Zoey receive support from fans on stage and exchange energy with them really resonated with us,” Twice members Jeongyeon, Jihyo, and Chaeyoung told TIME in an email. “Traveling to different cities, meeting [our fan group] Once, and feeling that connection gives us strength.” Kang and Applehans also aimed to capture the diversity of the fans, from kids to gym bros to women who dress in the image of their idols. But they didn’t shy away from the ways in which fandom can go too far, as when the fans turn literally soulless in their obsession with the Saja Boys.
Of course, like any work of art, the project has its detractors. One critic wrote that the songs sound as if they were created by AI. An online commenter called the story hypocritical for propping up protagonists who fight against having their souls captured, then attempt to “capture the souls of children and sell them merch.” But clearly these are minority opinions. As Huntr/x’s manager Bobby, voiced by Ken Jeong, says in the movie, “The internet loves this, and the internet is never wrong.”
Ejae, Rei Ami, and Audrey Nuna perch in director’s chairs at Netflix’s New York City headquarters on a glum October morning. It’s been less than 24 hours since Jimmy Fallon broke the news to them on camera that the soundtrack had been certified platinum.
For an on-camera game, they pass around TIME covers featuring musical luminaries—Lauryn Hill, Adele, Billie Eilish—ad-libbing snippets of their songs. When they get to Beyoncé, they sheepishly acknowledge that they sort of, accidentally, totally not on purpose broke one of her records when they became the first girl group to have a song at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for three weeks, besting the two weeks Destiny’s Child spent there for “Bootylicious” in 2001.
“When we found out about the Destiny’s Child thing …” Nuna begins sheepishly. “Honestly, the audacity,” continues Ami. “That was rude of us.”
Kelly, Beyoncé, and Michelle are in good company when it comes to being eclipsed, or at least matched, by fictional groups of Kpop Demon Hunters: the album marks the first time since 1995’s Waiting to Exhale that a movie soundtrack has had three singles crack the Billboard Top 10, and the Saja Boys’ “Your Idol” became the highest-charting song from a K-pop boy band in the history of Spotify U.S., surpassing BTS’s “Dynamite.”
“Golden” has achieved the kind of pop virality that happens maybe once a year (think Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso”). This is no accident. Executive music producer Ian Eisendrath assembled a deep bench of producers and a dozen credited songwriters for the soundtrack. “The directors were not interested in your business-as-usual animated musical where a character just breaks into singing their thoughts,” explains Eisendrath, whose musical-theater credits include the Broadway productions of Come From Away and A Christmas Story. Adds Choi: “The music resonated because the story was woven so well into it.”
The intricate construction of the songs has been the subject of scrutiny on social media. When the acclaimed music podcast Switched on Pop dedicated an episode to the soundtrack, its co-hosts observed how the notes in the first verse of “Golden,” about struggling to fit in, literally don’t fit into the underlying chords, nor do they align with the beat, until the chorus about self-acceptance suddenly aligns meaning and music both sonically and rhythmically.
The most stunning musical moment of the film comes at the top of the chorus of “Golden,” when Ejae hits a high note of A5. She had made the song intentionally difficult to sing, in thematic agreement with Rumi’s journey. “We kept doing it over and over in the studio, and she’s like, ‘Well, thank God I’m never going to have to perform this live,’” says Eisendrath. Then the demos she recorded landed her the singing role, and the onetime trainee who’d given up her dreams of performing found herself belting out the most ubiquitous song of the year.
“Ejae is cursing herself daily. I don’t know anyone else that sings this register,” says Eisendrath. She shrugs off the compliment. “It’s the breathing that’s hard,” she says. “And I definitely could not do it without these two,” she says, nodding toward Ami, who sings for Zoey, and Nuna, who sings for the spiky lead dancer Mira. “The song is the pop star here.”
If the music is one key element driving the movie’s success, the message is another. When Arden Cho was growing up as a Korean American kid in Texas, her peers often mocked her for the food she ate. “Kids would say our food was smelly or weird, and I carried so much shame about that,” says Cho, who provides the speaking voice for Rumi. “So to now see dishes like kkakdugi, kimbap, seolleongtang, and naengmyeon come to life, so beautifully animated, it means everything.”
KPop Demon Hunters does not merely animate traditional dishes; the movie captures how Rumi, Mira, and Zoey sit on the floor to eat them. (“Korean people don’t really use sofas. They’re just there,” says Hyo-seop, who called this one of the most casually Korean moments in the film.) Outside of mealtimes, it captures the insides of Hanuiwon (medicine clinics) and the etiquette of public bathhouses.
Most of these references go untranslated. “When you travel to a different city, you don’t always have a guide that explains everything to you, but you figure it out,” says Kang. Or as Applehans puts it, “People have been watching Hollywood stories for 100 years. They watched John Wayne movies, and most have not been to Wyoming or ridden a horse.”
The movie’s theme of self-acceptance is universal, but it also has a particular resonance for Korean audiences. “I was a K-pop trainee since I was 11,” says Ejae. “It’s a very perfectionist country. That can be mentally exhausting. Always having to look perfect, have good grades. You have to be pretty, you have to be skinny. This movie says it’s OK to not be perfect because not perfect is absolutely beautiful.” Says May Hong, who provides the speaking voice for Mira, of watching kids receive this message: “It’s retroactively soothing my immigrant-child self.”
Nuna applies this to her own upbringing. “As a woman of color growing up in the States, you are fed this idea that you need to be a certain way or fit in a certain role,” she says. “My whole life and artistry has been dedicated to a rebellion of this idea.” Adds Ami: “Zoey is very high energy and excitable. Those are the very traits I was told to suppress growing up. The stereotypes associated with Asian women are that we are submissive, docile. All my life I’ve been told, ‘You’re too much.’ That too-muchness gave me a platinum record.”
A sequel to KPop Demon Hunters is slated for 2029, which is not to say the demons will go dormant until then. “We hope there’s other ways we can tell the story,” says Lin. Netflix is also expected to submit at least one original song for the Oscars, in addition to competing in the Animated Feature category.
The filmmakers and cast have many hopes for the next installment. “I’d love to see more of Rumi’s journey, and to show even more of Korea,” says Cho. “I would love to see Rumi’s lower tones,” jokes Ejae. “Who is her father?” asks Ami. “The paternity test. I need it now.”
KPop Demon Hunters’ influence will likely be felt in the broader entertainment industry as well. In a risk-averse Hollywood, like begets like—one big-budget female-oriented action movie that rules the box office proves it’s safe to bet on another. In this case, that is good news for everything from original animation, at least on streaming, to first-time directors like Kang. “It shows that new voices are welcome,” says Lin.
Reflecting on the records set by KPop Demon Hunters, Lin brings up a 2021 movie called Red Notice. Starring Ryan Reynolds and Dwayne Johnson, it once held the honor of most watched Netflix film. Critics described it as “limp and dull” and “a $200 million existential crisis in light.” “It’s great that it was so well viewed,” he says, like a parent not wanting to single out their less talented child. “But I think this is pushing it to another level.”
That film had global movie stars fighting in black-tie attire and fumbling Cleopatra’s lost golden eggs, but it did not have a mold-breaking approach to each visual frame. It did not have theaters full of fans belting out lyrics in multiple languages. And it did not have people of all ages looking inward at the darkest parts of themselves and considering bringing them out into the light. “I get a little emotional every time I think about how many young kids are hearing this message,” says Yoo. “Maybe the 5-year-olds who are dressing up don’t really think about it that much now, but I hope they can carry it through the rest of their lives.”
Set Design by OPM