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KPOP DEMON HUNTERS on stage?! | Could the viral Netflix hit movie become a Broadway musical?
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It is reportedly Netflix's most watched original film of any genre Its soundtrack has broken record records with four simultaneous top 10 songs in the Billboard Hot 100. But could K Pop Demon Hunters ever make it to Broadway? Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you are listening to this on podcast platforms. If you are meeting me today for the first time, my name is Mickey Jo and I am a theatrical content creator and theatre critic here on social media. And today I arrive to your screens, your ears, your lives if you will, with a burning question. Could the mega hit K Pop Demon Hunters ever make it to the stage? To the world's most major musical theatre stages, Broadway and the West End? And it's a conversation that I feel is very much worth having. Now. Often when anything becomes successful on screen which incorporates music, especially music that is not diegetic, that is to say songs performed outside of the context of concert performances where the characters mean what it is that they are singing, there's often a subsequent buzz about the possibility of that then going to the stage. It happened with Smash, it happened with Schmigadoon, both very much musical theatre adjacent TV shows. But there are actually right now a great many factors which suggests that K Pop Demon Hunters could be really successful as a legitimate stage musical. Not least of which is the recent Tony Award winning success of another originally Korean produced musical, maybe Happy Ending, currently running at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway. That being said, I'm sure that many of you are right now getting ready to type a rebuttal because K Pop Demon Hunters, if it made it to Broadway, wouldn't be Broadway's first K Pop inclusive musical, the last having been the musical K Pop, which famously ran for a very short number of performances. So the question becomes, does a property like K Pop Demon Hunters have the kind of enormous global popularity that would guarantee its ability to sidestep some of the cultural issues faced by that other show. More to the point, would this even work as a stage musical? Is that even something that Netflix are considering? And if they are, is Broadway the only inevitable destination? All of these thoughts and more will be considered as we embark on this conversation. But in the meantime, I would also love to hear from you. Have you enjoyed K Pop Demon Hunters? In my experience so far, having recently watched the film finally for myself, people either have no idea what this is or are obsessed with it. And if you haven't watched it and you don't have time to right now, at the very least listen to some of the biggest hits from the soundtrack because not since I last visited a British pub Did I experience so many bangers? Let us know what you think of the movie and its potential for stage success in the comments section down below. And if you enjoyed listening to my thoughts, make sure to subscribe right here on YouTube. Turn on channel notifications so that YouTube lets you know every time I share a new musical theater themed video or go follow me on podcast platforms. In the meantime, let's talk about it. Is K Pop Demon Hunters going to make it to Broadway? So for the benefit of those of you who have clicked onto this despite having no idea what K Pop Demon Hunters is, and I promise I'm going to try and limit the number of times that I say the title over and over again, let me explain a little bit. So this is a new Netflix animated film which, as the title suggests, combines the world of the K pop music industry and its spectacle and scale and audacity and in particular its fan culture, with a sort of Buffy the Vampire Slayer familiar plot about three young women whose moral duty it is to try and prevent demons from another realm taking over the known world. The critical notion unifying these two ideas within the narrative being that they do this with the power of their voices, particularly when they sing together in harmony like it's Charmed or something. And from an entertainment point of view, that means that what the film does is combine this gorgeous fantastical art style in which we have not only these very vibrant K pop visuals and these great outfits and these huge stadium gigs and all of this wealth and extravagance and these huge lifestyles of these major music industry celebrities, but also the demonic world and these elaborate fight sequences. It's a really stunning animation style. Tonally, it is classic anime with a legitimately brilliant K pop score, which presumably is the thing that has really catapulted this to enormous success and guaranteed its fan appeal, and is the reason why so many people are obsessed with this right now, and why it's become Netflix's most successful film of all time, which obviously is a huge, huge deal. And I have often said, particularly when I was reviewing shows on Broadway in the last season, that a stage musical inherently needs two things. One of these is a great story and the other is great songs. And this property undeniably has fantastic songs and a brilliant soundtrack that could be very much expanded into a fuller theatrical score with a few more non diegetic moments to gain insights into these different characters and their personalities, particularly our central protagonist who has a lot of conflict around her identity. I'm not going to spoil it for you but you can find out by watching the film. And it's from that that we get that other thing that we need, which is the great story. Now, just K pop singers singing together to banish demons is enough for a fun narrative, but where we gain real depth is in the guil and the complicated moral questions arising around their duty and their responsibility, and the personal conflict experienced by their leader, who puts an enormous amount of pressure on herself, who feels pressure because of the demon hunting of it all, who also feels pressure coming from the K pop industry. This manifesting as her losing her ability to sing as flawlessly as she always has. And it's that emotional depth that I think takes this from like a six the musical kind of a vibe into something more substantial. And evidently it has already resonated with a really wide audience. Which brings us very neatly to the next question. Is this something that Netflix would even want? Now, until recently, this question may have been a little harder to consider, but Netflix have very much been dipping their toe into the theatrical world of late. Most notably of course, with the stage adaptation of the Stranger Things story. Stranger Things, the First Shadow, a sort of a preque to the world of the hugely popular TV series, which is currently playing concurrently in the West End and on Broadway at the Phoenix Theatre and the Marriott Marquis Theatre respectively. This production brought to the stage by the heavyweight theatrical producer Sonja Friedman in conjunction with Netflix and very much in the wake of other successful stage adaptations of huge IP like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which also is playing on either side of the Atlantic. Now, the long term financial success of Stranger Things, the First Shadow on stage, which it's worth pointing out is a huge and expensive production, has yet to be determined and time will tell. On that front, though, it is worth pointing out that the entire Broadway ecosystem seems to be more challenged than ever before with fewer and fewer reasonably priced shows. And I say reasonably only by comparison to the really audacious ticket prices and not as a general perspective, struggling to break even and struggling to recoup their initial investments by the time that they finish their runs. In other words, being remembered as financial flops. But what is clear is that there is some interest from Netflix in exploring this world. And I think the Wicked movie has probably only encouraged things in that direction because Wicked is now becoming this big multimedia success. You know, it was a hugely popular stage musical. Finally we got the screen adaptation. And now the success of that screen adaptation is introducing it to new audiences who are going to see it on stage. Yes, some of them are leaving at the interval like fools, because they don't want to spoil the second part for themselves. But I'm not here to judge their choices. You know, they paid for a ticket it they can decide not to see half of it if they want to. They don't know how good no good deed is and that's not their fault. They will find out later this year in cinemas and as a platform and a brand who have spent their entire lifetime kind of reevaluating their position in the media landscape, it wouldn't surprise me if Netflix are exploring the possibility of more stage adaptations, and they've done stage adjacent stuff before with experiences of the Bridgerton world and sort of secret cinema elements and licensing events like that. And honestly, neither Stranger Things nor Bridgerton really make anywhere near as much sense when it comes to considering the viability of a stage adaptation as K Pop Demon Hunters, which already lends itself to that world. Which is exactly what I want to talk about next. But before I do, I've been reading a couple of articles and think pieces about the possibility of K Pop Demon Hunters making its way to the stage, and many of them have invoked Frozen as another animated female character led property from a big studio that was really successful and subsequently adapted for the stage. I think this is a little different for a couple of reasons, and it's not exactly a success story either. Because Frozen wasn't purely turned into a musical on the basis of its unprecedented success and popularity. Frozen was the latest in what feels like an inevitable line of Disney's screen to stage adaptations, with predecessors in Beauty and the Beast and the Little Mermaid and Aladdin, and certainly many of their princess inclusive more traditional stories other than Tangled have since the 1990s been making their way to the stage. So a Frozen stage adaptation always seemed like something of a foregone conclusion. And yet it wasn't as successful perhaps as it ought to have been on Broadway. It ran for longer in the West End, and there are subsequent productions around the world, and there was a US tour and the West End production was filmed for a pro shot that's recently been released on Disney plus. And so I dare say with all of that, Frozen has broadly recouped and done financially well in the long run. But it wasn't a runaway stage success on the Great White Way. And in fact, if we think back a little further, the musical theater adjacent property like those other ones I mentioned back at the start of this conversation that people were expecting to be adapted for the stage and that people were asking for very quickly after Its release was the Greatest Showman and that is happening, but it has taken an awfully long time to make its way to the stage. Having been released as a film back in 2017, it is only at the start of next year, early 2026, that we are finally going to see the world premiere of the Great Showman's stage musical adaptation here in the uk. All of which is to say, even if there is going to be a K pop Demon Hunter stage adaptation, is that also going to take nine years to actually come to fruition? And if and when it does, you know, being an animated film, is it really going to work on stage as well as it works on screen? Let's talk.
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Mickey Jo
About it. So the theatrical viability of an animated film. Obviously, having already invoked Disney Theatrical, they are the leaders of this particular Broadway sub genre when it comes to taking animated stories and turning them into live action full stage musicals. They have been prolific in adapting their own catalog. Which isn't to say that they have had consistent crit financial success. And honestly, we could spend a lot of time having a separate conversation about considering which Disney films have turned into successful stage shows and which ones bafflingly didn't. But what is clear is that in spite of objective Broadway disappointments like the Little Mermaid and Tarzan, they have been responsible for a handful of big hits and none of them bigger than the Lion King. The Lion King is enormous. It is vast within the theatrical landscape. And it is essential to any conversation about stage success, stage musicals adapted from films, and particularly stage musicals adapted from animated films. And what's so fascinating is that when you consider all of the Disney properties that have been turned into stage musicals, the Lion King seems like the most logistically challenging. You do not have anthropomorphic characters. It is lions and warthogs and meerkats and trying to convey all of that on stage with its own. Own unique creative identity so that it doesn't feel like a stale rehash, like other reinterpretations of the Lion King that we could name, but also trying to convey enough of a sense of familiarity that kids still delight in the nostalgia. I mean, kids and adults alike, honestly, still delight in the nostalgia. That is a difficult thing to do. But Julie Taymor really nailed it with the production of the Lion King that went on to be very successful on Broadway, subsequently in the West End and then around the world. There are few musicals, I want to say. There are no musicals, in fact, which have achieved the same level of international market domination as the Lion King. So often I will travel, as I tend to do now, to a different part of the world and discover their theatre district for the first time. And I will look at all the different theaters and find out what's playing there. And inevitably, somewhere there will be the Lion King. There will be the Portuguese Lion King in Brazil. That was there when I visited to go see Wicked. I have walked past the French Lion King. I have walked past the German Lion King. The Lion King in is everywhere. And I think it's a great force in shutting down any conversation about the inherent challenges of adapting an animated property to the stage. And we're not talking Broadway here, necessarily, but there have been stage show versions of Pokemon and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and, you know, even the most challenging of concepts, people managed to find a way to stage. People are innovative, people are creative. And I don't think, for what it's worth, that K Pop Demon Hunters actually offers you that many challenges. They don't need to fall out of a plane at the beginning. They can be having that battle from their dressing room. And though, of course, you can't convey the same scale and energy of a stadium performance within most Broadway theaters or within most theaters around the world. What you can do is try and capture that same sense of excitement. Right now in the West End, a musical is playing at the Shaftesbury Theatre called Just for One Day that tells the story of Live aid and those two iconic simultaneous concerts that took place in the 1980s in Philadelphia and Wembley Stadium. And they are capturing that, that energy within a traditional West End theater. It can be done in terms of delivering those vocals and delivering that choreo. While real K Pop bands do it all the time, the Queens in six also do something very similar, very successfully eight times a week on Broadway. And by the time that we get to consider the demons of it all, that honestly feels like the easiest part of the show to bring to the stage. Like throw some demons on, that's fine, that's easy. That's costuming, that's makeup, that's great lighting. We have all of these things, we have all of the tools to make K Pop Demon Hunter Hunters really work on Broadway, in my opinion. Hell, I think creatively the material already has a hell of a lot more going for it than a lot of new musicals that we see opening on Broadway at the moment. And it has a pre built fan base. I think you would need to have a really insightful director, ideally one who well understands the nuances of anime as well as traditional book musicals, tonally speaking, in order to try and marry the two. Because if we just take anime style dialogue and characterizations and put them on stage, then that is going to be jarring. But at the same time, you don't want to too heavily adapt the thing and sacrifice what it is about K Pop Demon Hunters that the fans enjoy and will recognize. It's the same thing as the Lion King. It needs to have its own new unique creative identity. Otherwise what's the point in even doing it on stage? You may as well just be doing it at a theme park at that point. But it also needs to have that level of familiarity, most of which you find in the music and in the storyline line. But the best adaptations and the most celebrated ones retain the ethos and the heart and soul of the original project. Finally, if we're talking about the viability, we have to talk about how feasibly the show could be cast. And there is a wealth of brilliant talent who I think could bring these characters to the stage. And it's slightly serendipitous timing to be having this conversation because recently, amidst a little bit of controversy about the recasting of Darren Criss with Andrew Barth Feldman in maybe Happy Ending, a discussion was ignited about the underrepresentation and the comparative lack of opportunity for Asian talent on Broadway, of which there is an extraordinary amount. Hell, there are a bunch who have been in six the Musical alone and that obviously has a lot of overlap with the kind of skill set that you would need to play one of the main trio in K Pop Demon Hunters. And it's a huge sing and I'm already anticipating people commenting that no one is going to be able to replicate that vocal for a live performance. And to those people I think you need to go and Google Jasmine Forsberg or many of the other accomplished Broadway caliber performers like her. In short, the talent exists and for what it's worth, I think Broadway and its audience audience audiences would really enjoy this music. I think in the post Hamilton age that was continued by 6 we are seeing more and more overlap between catchy, dynamic pop and musical theater scores. Which brings me very neatly, I feel, to the final point of consideration. Would this be successful on Broadway in its current climate?
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Mickey Jo
Now. In my opinion, all signs point towards the possibility of huge creative, critical and financial success for a story like this. For a show like this on Broadway, however, we have to consider the extent to which case Pop just did not land, the extent to which that was a disappointing Broadway flop and I didn't get the chance to see K Pop on Broadway. Its closure was just before I started regularly visiting New York to see as many of the shows as possible. There are other brilliant content creators who have spoken about it in more depth on the Internet. You can go and find out a little bit more about the nuance of why that production closed. It had an off Broadway run previously that was more immersive, that was celebrated, and it sacrificed some of those qualities and the immersive, massive nature of the staging when it moved to Broadway and perhaps lost a little something in translation. But in any case, regardless of anyone's opinion about the quality of the show, it didn't resonate with audiences enough to be able to run ongoingly. Too few people bought tickets. And I think what's different here is that it didn't necessarily feel organic to the hugely popular world of K Pop. And the reality is that K Pop fans love K Pop and they already have an outlet for live performance. If you're a K Pop fan who wants to go and see your favorite K Pop band perform, you can just go and do that, geography notwithstanding. But if you're not someone who enjoys Broadway musicals, you feel a little less likely to go and see a Broadway musical called K Pop just because you like K Pop. It's not like you don't have the chance to go and celebrate that thing that you like in a more specific forum. It's like somebody opening a new theme restaurant where the theme is McDonald's. You can just go to McDonald's. That already exists. That's already a place you can sit down and eat that K Pop fans can already go and see K Pop. But a more specific story, something, something more theatrical, something that is narrative, something that is based on something that they already love but can't go and see live in person. Now that's going to be very different. And that critically is going to create a demand for tickets. Now, it's not necessarily like the kind of other shows that we see on Broadway, but I don't think that Broadway is going to thrive and succeed by playing it safe all of the time. And you know what is a show that was pandering to the sensibilities of Broadway audiences. Smash was that successful? Not particularly. In spite of its name and in spite of the capacity it ought to have had to resonate with the immediate Broadway community. That was a disappointing flop. Because ultimately, Broadway audiences don't need a story. They immediately recognize they are willing to be taken on a journey. They are willing to travel a little bit of distance. Culturally, we have learned that with many other hit, successful shows over the years, they are willing to encounter new characters, they are willing to hear new scores. All that they are craving is a great story and great songs ultimately, as well as other important factors like thrilling performances, entertainment value, and the show's emotional capacity, all of which I think K Pop Demon Hunters could bring to a Broadway theater. And if K Pop the Musical isn't a success story for a show like this, then perhaps maybe Happy Ending is, and not just because it's also Korean, but because the tone of the thing and the sensibility of that show has often been compared by many people to feeling not unlike an animated film. It has a very cinematic quality, but one that is also vivid and vibrant and emotive in a way that feels cartoonish. The result of that being a hugely mo story that has earned the show universal acclaim, and in one of the most competitive seasons in recent history, it won the Tony Award for Best New Musical and earned itself a huge number of fans. It has become a really hot ticket and it did all of that arriving as this relatively obscure title when it got to Broadway. Very few people, certainly very few people in New York had heard of maybe Happy Ending, and it opened to very low box office numbers, but gradually built its way up and became this massive success story. K Pop Demon Hunters, you can rest assured, isn't going to open to low box office office numbers. Whatever the show ends up being, it feels pretty likely to open with a substantial advance at the box office, presuming that the show ends up being marketed correctly and that the brand itself can endure. Which I guess is the biggest question out of all of this. K Pop Demon Hunter's huge right now, undeniably so. But Broadway musicals take a long time to be put together. Is that popularity going to last for long enough that it's going to help grant the show stage success? And I say all of this because right now some of the biggest producers on Broadway are openly talking about how financially challenging the landscape has become and openly considering the possibility of no longer producing shows in New York while the costs to them remain so staggeringly high and so off putting to potential investors. Of course, if there's one thing that investors do like, it is a show arriving with an extraordinary existing fan base. And if there's anything else maybe Happy Ending has taught us, it's the value of workshopping and developing your material elsewhere. That is a show that originated in Korea, and perhaps the most authentic thing here, and the best way to give back to the fans is for a K Pop Demon Hunter stage musical to commence in Korea, rather than considering everything in the theater industry with a very Broadway centric mindset or a West End centric mindset. I have no idea how we feel about K Pop here in London. Chances are there are probably many fans and I have no idea about all of this, but I don't know the extent to which that would really land here. Culturally And I'm no producer, but if I was, I would already be having conversations, the writers, with the composers of K Pop Demon Hunters, with Netflix, about the possibility of bringing this to the stage and developing a production which would originate in Korea, which would maybe have subsequent productions, maybe touring around Asia before readying for a big splashy Broadway opening. And I would be aiming ambitiously to try and cash in on the hype and do all of this within the next five years. And if there's one thing I know about Broadway producers, it is that they can smell money the way that pigs smell truffles. And if we're having this conversation chant, chances are it's already occurred to them and very possibly conversations are already being had, which is very exciting prospects, the results of which we will just have to wait and see. Is K Pop Demon Hunters going to make its way to the stage as a full musical? I hope so. And as always, I would love to know what you think. Let me know in the comments section down below. Thank you so much for listening to my thoughts. If you want to hear more about what's happening in the West End and on Broadway, as well as all of my reviews of shows that I see around the world, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel radio right here. Turn on notifications so you don't miss any new releases or go follow me on podcast or other social media platforms. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for ten more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theater. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
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