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Today, Explained
KPop Demon Hunters keeps slaying
00:25:50
The Netflix animated film KPop Demon Hunters is a mega cultural phenomenon. And the studio that used to own animation, Disney, is watching its dominance be tested...and maybe even fade.
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- [00:01]
A
We're going up with the mountain. All the kids are talking about K Pop Demon Hunters, Shawn. Have you seen it?
- [00:10]
B
I have not. No, I haven't. Is it good?
- [00:11]
A
Ah, if you're a kid, it's great. Oh, if you're a kid.
- [00:15]
B
Well, you know, Noelle, I'm gonna have a kid.
- [00:16]
A
I do know. It's why I invited you on the show today, to share with listeners some news.
- [00:21]
B
Thanks for having me. Yeah. I'll be gone for five months, starting sometime this month, and all sorts of great people will be filling in, and Noelle will be here. So the show will. Will still be the show you love. And I'll be back. And maybe when I'm back, you know, I can introduce you to my kid, who I might name K Pop Demon Hunter Ramis Firm. I don't know. We still haven't figured out a name.
- [00:41]
A
All right, you heard it here first. Founding daddy Sean Ramis Firm will be out for five months. Coming up on Today explained, K Pop Demon Hunters take over the world. What do you think?
- [00:54]
B
You did laugh at my joke about naming my kid K Pop Demon. I thought I tried to be funny, but it wasn't that funny. Support for the show today comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Today's news moves fast, but the most important stories deserve deeper thinking. Whether you're trying to understand the implications of a policy change or connecting dots across breaking stories, Claude, your new AI collaborator, can help you go beyond the headlines. Claude doesn't just summarize the news. It helps you explore the context, analyze the patterns, and think through what it all means together. Try Claude for free at Claude AI Todayexplained.
- [01:29]
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- [01:55]
D
This is today's blink.
- [01:58]
E
I'm Rebecca sun, and I'm a journalist and cultural critic.
- [02:01]
A
All right. So do you think, Rebecca, that it is fair to call K Pop Demon Hunters the movie and possibly even the soundtrack of 2025?
- [02:10]
E
100%. And the numbers bear that out. K Pop Demon Hunters just became Netflix number one most viewed movie ever. And now K Pop Demon Hunters Sing Along Movie grossed an estimated 18 to 20 million dollars over a two day run at the box office. Know quantifiably it is the only soundtrack that's ever had four songs in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time. Even Waiting to Exhale, which is the soundtrack which had the most songs in the top 10, which was five. And that was, if you remember, an all star soundtrack. Oh yeah, you know Whitney, Mary, you know Everybody that had five in the top 10, but not at the same time. So certainly no soundtrack has been as successful as K Pop Demon Hunters in decades.
- [03:15]
A
And what about streams? I imagine how many millions of people have watched this?
- [03:20]
E
Yeah, yeah. I mean it is now. So the way that Netflix quantifies this is they capture the views in the first 90 days of a title's release. And so that's what they do for all of their titles. And K Pop Demon Hunters is officially not just the most popular movie on Netflix of all time, but the most popular title of all time. It even overtook Squid Game, which had the record for, you know, like five years. And so K pop demon hunters, 325.1 million views in the first three months. But surely that number has continued to go up because I know people who are still watching it.
- [03:58]
A
For listeners who haven't seen it, what is this movie about?
- [04:03]
E
So K Pop Demon Hunters is about a trio of women. The world will know you as pop.
- [04:09]
A
Stars, but you will be much more than that.
- [04:13]
E
You will be Hunters. Their cover story is they are a highly successful three piece K pop girl band. We love Hunters. But what their real mission is is they use their songs, they use their music to fight demons. And music is the power that seals sort of creates this protective, they call it honmoon in the movie, this protective bubble to keep the demons out. Happy fans, happy hon moon. Now one particularly clever demon, Jinu decides, well, let's fight fire with fire. And so he enlists, he and four other demons create a five piece boy band to basically enrapture the souls of the public. Instead, they're coming after the fans. We gotta stop this now. So it's a very clever, very cute premise that works because then you end up getting a girl group versus a boy group with their attendant songs. And it's brilliant.
- [05:17]
A
It's like brilliant framing and their attendant like romance. It's like the boy group is quite hot. Hot throughout. You have them kind of navigating each other as like enemies, but also as like, you know, cuties, which I don't know, I really kind of loved that.
- [05:36]
E
That's Another thing that I found really brilliant about the movie is because it incorporates so many clever Easter eggs for these different references. And so there's definitely very specific references that are true to the practice of K pop fandom, the whole K pop subculture. There's also tropes that are taken straight out of K drama romances. You guys are so gross. When Rumi, who's the main female character, and Jinu, the main male character, when they first meet each other, there's a bump, there's a meet cute and then everything slows down. There's like a slow mo. The camera pan hands. There's actually a Korean song that starts playing. That is an Easter egg because that's the song that famously plays when the actor who voices Jinu, it's from one of his popular K dramas, Business Proposal, also available on Netflix. I mean, the layers go on forever, but it's. But it's all done sort of out of a loving homage is how I think all the fans took it. They're like, wow, this is made by people who are obsessed with all the same things I'm obsessed with.
- [06:50]
A
Where did this movie come from? How did Netflix get hold of it?
- [06:53]
E
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 Spider Verse movies. And the two directors, Maggie Kang and Chris Oppelhance, you know, 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 gonna put this mov 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 like 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'll reimburse you for the entire production budget and the rest is history.
- [07:50]
A
And Sony was not the only entity to misunderstimate this movie. You actually wrote on your substack, I was reading that you ignored an invitation from Netflix to pre screen this movie. Why? What was going through your mind?
- [08:03]
E
So first of all, I cannot compare myself anywhere to the level of import as a player in this universe. Thank you. But, you know, this is what was going through my head was I, you know, 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 like Netflix tried going to like merch retailers to say, like, hey, do you want to partner with us on this movie we have coming out? K pop Demon Hunters and all the merchandisers like, passed. And so, yeah, whatever, toy companies passed on making stuffed derpy tigers. Like they could have made so much money this summer.
- [09:07]
A
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?
- [09:32]
E
So 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, like, oh, washed up. Or, you know, there's a scandal happening in the west, so some western white person from the music industry out here could has to forced to go to Korea. And so 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 like read right in the. In the papers that K pop is big. They're like, let's do a K Pop thing, but like, let's make sure that it's, you know, this exotic thing makes sense to people and so they're trying to sort of reverse engineer its popularity. Whereas K Pop Demon Hunters, what's interesting about it is that it takes place in a universe where you're just assumed that every single person in the world, every single character in the movie is obsessed with K pop. Like, 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. And so I found that every single project that highlights some sort of historically excluded culture or some subculture, they always are more successful if they just throw you in there rather than attempt to handhold you in some cheesy way.
- [11:20]
A
I was. I was talking to some friends. They are four and six years old, and they were telling me how much they love K pop Demon Hunters. And I was talking to their mom at one point over their heads and we were saying, like, okay, we get it. But like, if you're. If you're hearing the songs 17,000 times a day, at a certain point you are going to feel like you're having a nervous breakdown.
- [11:41]
E
I've never seen so many kids be.
- [11:42]
D
Obsessed with something so quick because we're.
- [11:46]
E
Going up that moment.
- [11:52]
A
How long do you think this movie is going to dominate for? Like, at what point does the obsession fade?
- [11:58]
E
I mean, that is. That's a question to ask some kids, you know, like, how long did their frozen phase last? How long did the encanto phase last? This, I do feel, has a little bit of legs because unlike the songs from those movies, which were much more traditional animated musical songs, the K Pop Demon hunter songs are pop songs. They're really different. You have like the up, the inspirational ballad like Golden. You have a, like a lovely, like, what I call it, like a Y2K coded R B duet like Free, which I found I find to be, like, highly underrated. Why does it feel right every time I let you in? What does it feel like? I can tell you anything. And then you have kind of like a really propulsive rap, like sort of a diss track, like, take down. It's a takedown.
- [13:08]
A
I'm gonna take you out. You'll break down.
- [13:10]
E
Like what? It's a takedown. I'm gonna take you out and it ain't gonna stop. But I would also look out for early next year because that is when Oscar campaigning kicks into gear. And I can tell you as a fact that Netflix is. You know, I would not be surprised if you see an increase in marketing around that time. And so then there might be, like, a resurgence. Like, you might see a little swell again at the beginning of the year when they start campaigning for Oscars.
- [13:48]
A
Rebecca sun, she's a journalist and cultural critic, and her substack is called the quiet Part. Coming up, bro. Disney is so mad right now.
- [14:04]
D
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- [15:33]
H
Excludes Massachusetts.
- [15:37]
A
Hey. Hey, everybody. It's Today Explained. It's me, Noel, from earlier. Drew Taylor is a senior writer at the Wrap. He hosts an animation podcast called Voice Fine Tuning. All right, so, Drew, this is the biggest animated movie of the year, if not the decade, and it is not a Disney movie. How unusual is it that an animated movie that's not a Disney movie breaks out like this?
- [16:04]
G
Well, you know, it's becoming more common. You know, Netflix has been great at counter programming for the big theatrical animated movies. It's something that they've done really well in the past couple of years, most successfully when they opened Leo, we're all just people and lizards, which is a Adam Sandler lizard animated comedy against Wish you're a Star, which was Disney's big Thanksgiving animated movie. And Leo just was a huge hit. And Wish was not you're a Snow. But we've never seen a Netflix animated movie perform like. I mean, we've never seen any Netflix movie perform like this, which is just insane.
- [16:46]
A
So it's fair to say, post K pop demon hunters, Disney is not ascendant. But let's go back in time. When did Disney start to assert dominance in animation? The kind of dominance that we think of when we think Disney and cartoons.
- [17:03]
G
So Disney really rose to, you know, kind of becoming the cream of the crop in animation. In the late 80s, Disney had a set of animators called the Nine Old Men, who were really, who were still there in the 80s, but they were kind of begrudgingly allowing this new crop of animators into the building. And, you know, they would, like go to the New York Times and like, you know, talk smack about the production of the Black Cauldron, which was supposed to be sort of like, you know, that was supposed to be the new era's kind of like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. And it absolutely was not. Beautiful Princess, the mischievous Gurgi the magical pig.
- [17:41]
E
Henwin, the fiendish creeper.
- [17:43]
G
Black Cauldron cost $44 million to make and made less than half that at the box office. So when these new executives were installed and Jeffrey Katzenberg was put in charge of animation, the nine old men basically left. And this new crop of animators were finally given the chance to kind of do what they had wanted to do. A period that freaks like me refer to as the Disney Renaissance. And that's where you get movies like, you know, Aladdin, the Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, which was the first animated feature to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar and is only one of three animated movies to ever be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. So, yeah, it was a wonderful time back then, and it lasted until roughly 1999 with the release of Tarzan.
- [18:38]
E
Uh.
- [18:39]
A
Oh, what happened then? What happened in 99?
- [18:42]
G
I mean, what happened, I think, was that, you know, they were looking to branch out into other avenues. This is when they sort of started targeting young boys instead of young girls, although obviously those movies were watched by everybody. So you had things like Treasure Planet and Atlantis, the Lost Empire. And then obviously you have the influx of computer animation. This is when Disney was still traditional 2D house. And, you know, Pixar is coming out with Toy story in 1995 to infinity. And DreamWorks Animation is coming out with Shrek and Ants a little bit later. And the whole kind of dynamic was changing, and Disney was kind of stuck. You know, it's kind of analogous to what's happening now because they were so committed to this one style and this one kind of production process that they were being left behind.
- [19:40]
A
I definitely remember in the 2000s when Disney was not cool, but Pixar was incredibly cool. Yes, but then at some point, Disney bought Pixar and beyond. How does that fit into the story of Disney's success or lack of success?
- [20:01]
G
Well, what's interesting about the purchase of Pixar, which was completed by Bob Iger in his, like, first year or so as CEO, Iger was installed. He bought Pixar and he put John Lasseter, the kind of creative head of Pixar, in charge of the entire creative side of Disney.
- [20:21]
H
I felt that I had to address Disney animation, that it needed. It needed huge improvement. And I thought the fastest way to accomplish that, albeit the riskiest and the most expensive, was to buy Pixar. Pixar at that point exemplified original storytelling and quality and creativity in its highest form.
- [20:41]
G
Lasseter is a huge animation buff, and he really doubled down on this commitment to quality. You know, he kind of applied the Pixar formula to Disney. And I feel like what was nice about that period was that both companies were sort of being led by the same ethos, but we're making very different films. But, yeah, they have kind of waxed and waned in terms of cultural relevance, I would say, in the past decade or so, right?
- [21:08]
H
You look at Frozen and you look at Moana, and you look at Zootopia, and all the IP that that created, generated. Everything that we've done at Disney Animation since then was tied to the Pixar acquisition.
- [21:22]
G
You know, obviously in 2019, they had frozen two, which was the biggest animated feature of all time into the end. I believe it has been eclipsed, obviously by Nezh 2, the Chinese movie, which has made like two and a half billion dollars or something. But since then, there have been some struggles. You know, Strange World was famously a huge disaster. It was, again, kind of courting that young male audience, and it just did not work. And Wish was not financially successful, which was meant to be their kind of celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Disney, and it just didn't connect.
- [22:02]
A
I was expecting a lot more for.
- [22:04]
E
Like, the hundredth anniversary Disney animation film changes that I think would have made Disney's movie Wish a lot better.
- [22:10]
A
Is the company straining too hard to remind audiences of its legacy with this movie?
- [22:15]
G
And I think that there was a lot of sort of hand wringing about what could be done. And what could be done ended up being turning a show that was meant for Disney into a theatrical movie and making a billion dollars last year with Moana, too.
- [22:29]
B
You're welcome.
- [22:31]
G
And, you know, I think that for better or worse, Disney has been part of conditioning audiences to go to streaming for animation, for original animation. You know, Pixar put three of its very best animated movies directly to Disney Soul Luca and Turning Red. And, you know, Encanto really found its audience on Disney. They didn't show up to the theaters, but they showed up on Disney. So I think that when you have a sequel like Inside out two, of course it's going to do huge theatrically. Everybody has seen it, everybody has to see it on the big screen. But some of these wilder, smaller, more original projects are perhaps going to be defined by their streaming life.
- [23:18]
A
You clearly follow the world of animation very closely. You have named movies that I have not thought about in years, movies I have not seen. Let me ask you to be prophetic now for a moment. What upcoming releases do you think in late 2025 and throughout 2026 are gonna tell us where animation is headed?
- [23:41]
G
Well, here's what's fascinating about 2026. 2026 is almost all original animation from the big studios. Oh, and to me, that is really, really exciting. Sony has a movie called Goat, which is about a goat that plays basketball and is going to be the greatest of all time. Obviously, that's his goal. But then you have things like Hoppers, which is the Pixar movie about a, a young scientist who puts her brain in the inside the body of a robotic beaver. You know, that old story.
- [24:13]
A
How could you be called that?
- [24:15]
G
The forgotten island from, from DreamWorks, which is going to be so great. And you know, there are still sequels. There's Toy Story 5 is coming out next summer. And, you know, I'm sure we'll make more money than they can count and beyond. But Disney has an original animated movie called Hexed, which I am really, really excited about, that is kind of a modern fairy tale, kind of set in the world of witches and has the potential to be really exciting and bold. And I just hope that they, they commit to it and that they don't shy away from the kind of idiosyncrasies that have made some of these movies from DreamWorks or Sony or these other companies so special. And obviously they're connecting with audiences. So I hope that that kind of gives them the backbone to kind of go all in.
- [25:11]
A
Drew Taylor is a senior writer at the Wrap. He hosts an animation podcast called Fine Tuning. Denise Guerra and Danielle Hewitt produced today's show. Jolie Myers edited. Patrick Boyd is our only engineer, and Laura Bullard checks the facts. I'm Noel King. It's TODAY Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again with Saks Fifth Avenue. It can be a breeze to shop for your personal style, like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend. This is very Sean. This is very Sean coated Gucci loafers. Saks says Saks makes shopping feel totally customized to you, whether that's from an in store stylist or a visit to Saks.com where they can show you just what you want.
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