How KPop Demon Hunters became the surprise Netflix smash of the summer

The Guardian

a day ago

School is out, young audiences are available, and yet still, Hollywood animation is having a bad summer at the box office. In contrast to last year, when Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 occupied two of the season's top three (and combined for about $2.7bn worldwide), it seems entirely possible that not a single fully animated movie will crack the top 10. Adding insult to injury: the Disney-Pixar original Elio has been trounced by 'live-action' remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, which faithfully reproduce old cartoons with bland new actors and CG visual effects. With younger audiences steered toward those movies and seemingly also welcomed into big-tent hits like Superman and Jurassic World: Rebirth, it's all the more remarkable that Netflix has somehow managed to have its biggest animated movie ever. KPop Demon Hunters, about a trio of women who form a pop group while moonlighting as, yes, demon hunters, was released in June – on the same weekend as Elio, no less – and has become a soundtrack-selling, replay-friendly phenom. Netflix numbers can be opaque, but there's confirmation in Golden, a centerpiece song from the movie, hitting #2 on the Billboard charts. When was the last time a Disney movie made a play for song of the summer?
Animation seems like a safe bet for budget-conscious streaming content. After all, the much-lamented cost of a movie ticket is tripled or quadrupled when bringing a family (and then maybe tripled again if they want snacks). On a per-person basis, streaming a new cartoon is the more affordable option. But even after poaching film-makers from major animation studios, the streamers have struggled with original material; Netflix's The Sea Beast isn't anywhere near as good as Moana, with which it shares a co-director, and its Over the Moon (the directorial debut of Glen Keane, a longtime Disney animator) is downright ghastly. Spellbound, from Skydance's attempt to start their own animation house led by the disgraced former Pixar honcho John Lasseter, arrived with barely a peep last Thanksgiving. Most of the time, the Netflix charts are dominated by older animated titles from established studios like DreamWorks and Illumination. So why did KPop Demon Hunters break through?
Maybe it helps that it isn't an in-house Netflix production; the movie was actually produced by Sony Pictures Animation, the studio that worked such genre-bending magic with the Spider-Verse movies. KPop isn't quite as ambitiously style-forward as that series, but it shares the same basic visual approach of intentionally choppy but eye-catching, shapeshifting animation that imitates both comic-book splash pages and anime, splattered in purple and pink hues. It's not clear when Sony decided they would pursue a streaming release, but Netflix previously distributed the similarly manic (and original) The Mitchells vs the Machines when the pandemic delayed its planned theatrical release.
The Netflix-Sony cartoons seem to indicate that maybe there's more cultural cachet in standing out from the animation crowd, rather than doing off-brand versions of Disney-style songs and Pixar-style secret worlds. In particular, KPop Demon Hunters seems freer to capitalize on a cultural trend than its mainstream competition. Disney has become so self-conscious about its own iconography that its last non-sequel in-house animated feature, Wish, was an extended 100th-anniversary celebration for its parent company, packed with references to their animated classics. Their big release for this fall is Zootopia 2, a stringing out from a great original idea they debuted almost a decade ago. The other big US animation houses are similarly sequel-fixated; the last big animated release of the summer is The Bad Guys 2, from DreamWorks.
Not only is KPop Demon Hunters not a sequel, nor even a comics adaptation, it feels engaged with a world outside of its parent company, no matter how heightened its wild fantasy action becomes. By making the central characters a K-pop group, the movie finds something that breaks the princess/talking animal/scrappy kid hegemony. It's about young-adult characters with major responsibilities (even if those responsibilities involve the equally fantastical pop-girlie grind and Buffy-esque demon-fighting), carried out with an aspirational big-sister energy that younger kids can watch with wide-eyed admiration usually reserved for Disney princesses.
American interest in K-pop may have even peaked; technically, the optimal time for this movie might have been circa 2021 – not coincidentally, the year the movie's production was announced. But though KPop Demon Hunters has some adult themes and scary monsters, it's also pitched young enough that it's almost better-equipped than if it had come at the height of the BTS craze. The movie very much repackages K-pop for an even-broader audience of native English speakers (something K-pop itself has been doing for years at this point) in a way that draws from the trend's fandom without relying exclusively on it. Demon Hunters also constructs a fantasy version of the pop machine, particularly the astonishing levels of training received by a lot of K-pop acts; here, all the girls' hard work is entirely at the behest of their own artistic vision, and they rise-and-grind off the couch voluntarily, not because a music label is forcing them.
It's probably no accident that the lower reaches of the movie's audience are probably also discovering their own music for the first time – and making their preferences known on the charts, as a whopping nine songs from KPop Demon Hunter are currently on the Billboard Hot 100. That closeness to the pop world also allows the movie to make pop stars its dauntless heroines and devious villains all at once. (The demons disguised as a boy band sing an infectious ditty called Soda Pop that even the movie's demon-savvy characters can't really resist.) So much pop taste formation involves sussing out what you find irresistible versus what you find deeply annoying, two qualities that can reverse themselves with surprising ease. Even if KPop Demon Hunters is ultimately more about self-acceptance and friendship than the dynamics of pop music, it's letting a younger audience try out pop fandom. In that way, it welcomes those viewers into the kind of faux-grownup world that they often get from PG-13 live-action superhero movies.
As with superheroes, the response to this movie's success will mostly be 'make sequels to this specific movie, forever' with a possible dash of 'streaming animation is really happening this time!' It shouldn't be, though. In the wake of so many sequels from Disney, Pixar, Illumination and DreamWorks, KPop Demon Hunters is a reminder that kids in particular hunger for novelty, probably more so than their nostalgia-drunk adult counterparts. Despite their ongoing enthusiasm for any number of cartoon franchises, family audiences aren't just waiting around for Despicable Me 5. They are hoping, conscious or not, for something with more pop.