The summer of 2025 was accented by the vibrant sounds of K-pop courtesy of Netflix’s smash hit Original film, KPop Demon Hunters, which not only rose to the top of their own viewing charts but also took over the box office for a weekend, owned the Billboard charts, and eventually won both Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song at the Oscars, both planting a flag for the K-pop genre and the animation medium alike.
Fans of the film should be flocking to grab VANDYTHEPINK’s KPop Capsule collaboration with Netflix and McDonald’s, and they may be trying to test anyone with that KPop heat on. This is where we come in. Just watching the film may not be enough; if you need to increase your KPop Demon Hunters ball knowledge, to impress your friends, or not look like a poseur, here are 10 things you didn’t know about KPop Demon Hunters.
It is the most-watched Netflix Original ever
The animated Netflix Original has almost 100 million more hours watched than Red Notice, which stars The Rock and Ryan Reynolds, in the No. 2 position.
It is also Netflix’s first No. 1 film in the United States
Keep in mind that the only theatrical release of KPop Demon Hunters was the sing-along version, which played in only 1,700 theaters for two days. It brought in almost $20 million that weekend, dethroning Weapons.
The film drew inspiration from Bong Joon Ho’s The Host
If anything, KPop knows how to juggle emotions, and this came straight from a viewing of The Host. “I wanted to mimic his style, in a way, in this movie,” KPop co-director Maggie Kang said at the Busan International Film Festival about Bong’s 2006 film. “I was really inspired by the way he juggled many different tones in [The Host]. I actually didn’t know that you could do that in a movie. It was the first time I had seen it.”
Rumi was a character created long before KPop Demon Hunters
It’s funny how things work. Nine years before the release of KPop, Kang had created the character Rumi for “another project,” she shared during a Reddit AMA, saying that Rumi was initially created for her husband Rad Sechrist's comic Plastic Walrus.
The music of the Saja Boys purposefully lacks soul
One of the dope things about cinema is that you can express different emotions in unique ways. One of the points the filmmakers wanted to get across was that the Saja Boys were dope on the surface, but lacked depth. One way they chose to do that was with the music that the group performed: “We wanted the Saja Boys' songs to be super catchy, but slightly hollow, like there’s no real soul underneath,” KPop co-director Chris Appelhans told Mashable. “In contrast, the HUNTR/X songs are emotionally vulnerable and honest. The idea was that the surface-level part of your heart might be obsessed with the boys, but the deeper part is moved by the girls. It’s that feeling when an artist shares something raw, like "drivers license" or Lemonade, and you’re stunned they went there, but you feel it so deeply. That’s the space we wanted HUNTR/X to live in.”
It also has the most costume looks for any animated film ever
Due to how many different ways we see the HUNTR/X in the film, from performing on-stage to actual demon hunting, KPop ended up having so many different looks.
Lorde’s “Green Light” was an inspiration for the smash hit “What It Sounds Like”
One of the biggest hits from the film is the platinum-selling “What It Sounds Like,” which would have the least-KPop-loving viewer shedding a tear (or feeling inspired) by this anthemic number. During their Reddit AMA, Appelhans specifically said that Lorde’s 2017 single “Green Light” is both “vulnerable” and “anthemic,” giving them inspiration that they could achieve both with a song like “What It Sounds Like” during their finale. The vocoder sections in Imogen Heap’s “Hide & Seek” also get a shout-out.
Full choreography for the film doesn’t exist
With a budget of over $100 million, you have to make sure you’re spending money wisely, and that means that if you aren’t seeing a movement on screen, it’s likely not been worked out. At least that’s how Kang put it during their Reddit AMA. “We do not have full choreography! We only have it for the sections that are see on screen.” Citing budget reasons makes all of the sense in the world, especially when it’s stated plainly: “what we don't see, we do not pay for lol.”
Sony’s Spider-Verse films impacted the KPop visual style
Even though Josh Beveridge and the Sony Pictures Animation team worked on this, that’s not what I’m talking about. The way Sony reinvigorated the animation medium with those Spider-Verse films felt like the characters were leaping out of the comics into a 3-D world. Kang didn’t want to imitate the style, though; it was more the team trying to figure out how to compete.
“Chris and I were invited to the premiere of Spider-Verse, and as soon as it started, I texted him saying, ‘Oh, no. How are we going to do this?’ Because it was just so stunning,” Kang told Animation Magazine. They’re always breaking boundaries and showing us something new. So, if we played that game, it would be hard to beat [Spider-Verse]. So we pulled away from every 2D element in our movie. We took a lot of inspiration from faces and the look and feel of anime but do a CG version of it. There’s one thing that we didn’t catch, but I think 99.9% of everything is CG.”
Abby Saja has bigger muscles than the rest of the Saja Boys, on purpose
Oddly enough, though each Saja Boy has a unique look, they apparently have one thing in common. “Fun fact: they all share the same CG body, except for Abby Saja, because he’s a little bit bigger,” Kang revealed to Forbes. “We bulked him up like 20%.”
