Netflix has never had a hit quite like KPop Demon Hunters. The infectiously cheery animated musical follows two fictional K-pop groups, the angelic Huntrix and their demonic counterparts the Saja Boys, as they try to harness their fans’ support to either protect or enslave the world. KPop Demon Hunters is now Netflix’s most viewed movie of all time, even though it was first released on the platform without much fanfare (and was produced by Sony Pictures Animation). Several of its songs, including “Golden,” “Soda Pop,” and “Your Idol,” topped the Billboard charts for months. Now KPop Demon Hunters has been nominated for the Oscars’ Best Animated Feature and Best Song awards, having already won Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globes, among other prizes.
This reception has led Netflix to change its standard operating procedure in a few ways, including the commission and sale of merchandise, as well as a series of event-style singalong screenings, which gave the normally theatrical-averse streamer its first (modest) box office hit. KPop Demon Hunters grossed $19 million during its first weekend of singalongs last August. But is Netflix ultimately responsible for KPop Demon Hunters‘ cross-cultural success? And why aren’t there more breakouts like it, especially given reports that since 2023, Korean content—which accounts for 17% of the platform’s releases—has consistently been the streamer’s second highest-watched after U.S. titles?
A number of exceptional factors contributed to the movie’s place in the zeitgeist, including the streamer’s atypical post-release promotion. Netflix usually only promotes its Original titles, and KPop Demon Hunters is technically not among them. Even the company’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos credits the movie’s “superfans” with its prominence, which steadily grew after its streaming premiere in June, when it was only watched by an estimated 9.3 million subscribers.
But Sarandos insists that Netflix’s streaming-first release strategy hasn’t changed even after KPop Demon Hunters‘ theatrical windfall. (Exceptions will supposedly be made for Warner Bros. titles, which Sarandos recently said would be given 45-day theatrical-first engagements, in the event that Netflix acquires Warner Bros.) In fact, he feels vindicated by Netflix’s streaming-centric approach to distribution since K-pop fans “drove the recommendation engine:” “If anything, this actually reenforces our strategy, because being on Netflix actually allowed the film to build momentum.” One can’t exactly check this quote’s claim, given Netflix’s selective reporting of its content’s viewership, making it hard to know why this movie’s momentum was big enough to warrant a theatrical release and not any number of other releases, Netflix Originals or otherwise.
KPop Demon Hunters‘ massive global footprint certainly seems to confirm Sarandos’ rationale, but the movie’s theatrical release also makes it easy to wonder what could’ve been if Netflix had put its weight behind it (and put the film in theaters) in the first place. In a recent edition of the FranchiseRe newsletter, film journalist David A. Gross suggested that KPop Demon Hunters could have grossed somewhere between $600 million and $1 billion worldwide if Netflix initially promoted it as a theatrical release. Those numbers are conservative estimates, Gross wrote: “It’s possible that interest in the movie would have ‘melted up’ during the week before opening, as it does a couple times a year when the word is out and the buzz takes on a life of its own. It might have opened to $75 million, or more.”
At TheWrap, Jeremy Furster argued that the KPop Demon Hunters phenomenon would be “hard to imagine” had the movie gone straight to theaters. Furster pointed to the movie’s online virality, largely inspired by its catchy songs. “You can see this over and over on social media,” Furster writes, “with fans (including plenty of kids) re-enacting the choreography to each of the musical numbers in the film, sometimes right next to the TV screen.” Moreover, the movie’s “immediate availability on streaming enabled Netflix to capitalize quickly.”
Gross countered that the movie would have made something like $30-35 million per weekend, propelled by repeat viewings from young moviegoers. Among an estimated 150 U.S. wide releases per year, KPop Demon Hunters might have been a “1-in-300 success.” “A picture like this has never happened for Netflix,” Gross added. “It’s the first time in at least 10 years.” And, remember, this isn’t even a Netflix Original.
So why did Sony sell KPop Demon Hunters‘ distribution rights in the first place? Bad timing, according to Puck News‘ Matthew Belloni, who points out that the movie was picked up in 2021, soon after Netflix and Sony reached a “direct to platform” arrangement that gave Netflix a first look at select live-action and animated projects. This agreement guaranteed Netflix a certain number of titles that the two companies would develop together and which Netflix would distribute after paying a premium of up to $20 million on top of the budget for each project.
“It breaks my heart that much of Sony’s 2020s animation was understandably sold to Netflix at the start of COVID, cash in hand,” box office analyst and entertainment journalist Scott Mendelson tells The A.V. Club. Mendelson maintains that the only recent animated movies that seemed like can’t-miss investments were based on existing intellectual property, like The Grinch or The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
Mendelson observes that Netflix’s skittishness about theatrical-first engagements might be explained by The Argylle Treatment, a phenomenon first observed by box office pundit The Entertainment Strategy Guy. Named after Apple’s critically reviled and financially dismal 2024 spy satire, The Argylle Treatment suggests that a streamer is more likely to skip theatrical engagements since a theatrical release means greater “expectations and coverage,” and more intense scrutiny. “Which is great if you have it,” Mendelson adds, “Because that helps when the movie comes to streaming. But if most of the coverage is negative for one reason or another, apparently a $3 trillion company gets very sensitive.”
At the same time, Mendelson believes that Netflix’s failure to see the potential of KPop Demon Hunters is damning for the stream’s decision-makers. The elements that eventually drew fans in seemed evident based on the movie’s preview, even without prior knowledge of K-pop: “The fact that they didn’t see this big, lively, energetic, exciting musical adventure starring, if I may, glamorous, attractive, but also relatably goofy female K-pop singers, who also fight demons on the side—if that didn’t scream money, metaphorically speaking, to a streaming platform, who’s already removed from the equation the ticket price and the drive to the theater—I think that says a lot about Netflix’s overall thinking.”
Why didn’t Netflix see what it had with KPop Demon Hunters? Some have argued that K-pop’s seeming ubiquity made the movie an obvious slam dunk with global audiences. But K-pop itself isn’t exactly an organic phenomenon, owing much of its popularity to the South Korean government’s decades-long promotion of hallyu, or the Korean Wave of pop culture.
KPop Demon Hunters obviously wasn’t produced in Korea, but it’s hard to imagine that its success didn’t benefit from the Korean government’s mandate to foster global interest for all things hallyu. If anything, KPop Demon Hunters has led to Korea’s government doubling down. Responding to the movie’s international acclaim, South Korean President Lee Jae-Myung renewed his pledge to make the export of all things hallyu one of the country’s top industries. The president was impressed by KPop Demon Hunters‘ fan-favorite character Derpy the tiger, commending the filmmakers for having “transformed the tiger, one of the animals most feared by the Korean people, into something lovable and cute.”
This response by the Korean government is indicative of its hand in K-content’s popularity—it’s more responsible for its release than in actively shaping its viewers’ tastes. What breaks out with Western audiences doesn’t necessarily translate with Korean viewers. Pierce Conran, a South China Morning Post journalist specializing in Korean pop culture, tells The A.V. Club that the dystopian survival series Squid Game wasn’t immediately watched in Korea (“too violent”), but rather picked up goodwill after it became a mega-hit abroad. “People in Korea were so excited that it was embraced overseas that people here gave it another chance.” Similarly, Korean singalong screenings of KPop Demon Hunters weren’t nearly as popular as they were in the U.S. “The idea of a singalong does not work at all in Korea,” Conran says. “People will not sing in the theater.”
Like the Korean government, Netflix also sets a big table and then lets the rest of the world make what they will of their latest offerings. “Netflix invests and puts out a lot of content and they don’t necessarily push things very aggressively at first,” Conran says. “Instead, they hit to see how their metrics respond to content. They know that Korean content is doing well, so they obviously have invested a huge amount into Korea. First it was dramas and films and reality TV. So they’ve got a spread of stuff across the board and are waiting to see what happens.”
The reactive nature of Netflix’s laissez-faire release strategy makes it hard to gauge what success looks like to a platform that can afford to keep rolling the dice without a firm, across-the-board metric of popularity. A theatrical-first release would likely make it easier to know if and how KPop Demon Hunters connected with so many viewers—and that’s maybe still possible for the inevitable sequel. But Netflix’s future gambles will likely not be so lucky. “Netflix was always able to play by a different set of rules than the legacy studios which they claimed to disrupt,” Mendelson concludes. “So they get credit for a film or a show existing, in theory, even if eventually nobody liked it or nobody watched it.” In this way, Netflix’s streaming-first release pattern resembles Schrödinger’s cat—you can only tell how lively a hit like KPop Demon Hunters is once you’ve opened the mystery box. This specific movie’s charm remains evident, but what about the next potential hit? Where will it come from? What will it look like?
Netflix released the Korean disaster movie The Great Flood this past December. Its merits weren’t immediately obvious, as Conran recalls the movie’s wan reception in September at its Busan International Film Festival premiere. But The Great Flood would go on to be Netflix’s seventh-most streamed non-English language movie of all time. Could it have done even better if Netflix promoted it more, either theatrically or before releasing it straight to its platform? We’ll never know—not unless Netflix suddenly decides to change its distribution model. Until then, the box will remain shut, leaving us to wonder about each new release’s quality of life.
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