‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Just Slayed Disney At Its Own Cartoon Movie Musical Game

The last time Disney put out an animated movie musical, Wish turned into one of their highest-profile flops in recent memory. Actually, no: The last time Disney put out an animated movie musical, it was Moana 2, but you forgot all about that, because however negligible the movie itself is, its songs are even more so. The point is, songs are a key component of Disney’s in-house animation, still capable of spawning a sui generis hit like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” (from the 2021 film Encanto) and visiting humiliation upon the likes of Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine, who gamely gave their all to a series of actually-not-that-bad tunes from Wish that nonetheless didn’t have that Lin-Manuel Miranda/Ashman and Menken/Lopez and Lopez juice. Some boring songs and a big flop are a little unusual for Disney, but far from unprecedented. Less familiar, though, is the company getting smoked by a bunch of K-pop songs. That’s precisely the symbolic victory Netflix has pulled off with their feature cartoon KPop Demon Hunters.

Usually when a competing studio outdoes Disney, especially with a signature franchise, it’s by offering some kind of perceived difference (even if they’re actually ripping them off pretty closely). DreamWorks initially offered an imitation of grown-up snark with the Shrek movies. Illumination’s Minions series trades in Looney Tunes-like mayhem, picking up the slack left by Warner Bros. The Spider-Verse movies boast a superhero world unavailable to Disney (despite owning the character!), and an intensity of action that their family-oriented cartoons don’t attempt. KPop Demon Hunters, an unexpected Netflix phenom, comes from Sony’s animation studio and utilizes a phantasmagoric, anime-influenced style similar to the Spider-Verse projects. The premise of the movie is basically Hannah Montana meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer: A trio of pop singers who make up the group Huntr/x secretly moonlight as superpowered slayers of malevolent demons. When the boy band Saja Boys appears on the scene, the girls find out that their chart rivals are actually demons, which hits home for Rumi (Arden Cho), who keeps an additional secret: She’s part demon herself.

So yeah, it’s also pretty distinct from Disney stuff. But it also steps to Disney by proceeding as a full musical, and an upstart cartoon musical doing this well is virtually unheard-of. Even Pixar doesn’t bother making musicals; that’s how closely associated the practice is with Disney. (And how square it’s supposed to be; despite the jillion-selling soundtracks, lots of kids’ movies still make jokes about “breaking into song” that are far hackier than most actual musicals.)

To be fair, a number-one hit on Netflix isn’t exactly a billion dollars worldwide. (That’s what Moana 2 did, crummy songs notwithstanding.) Literally any DreamWorks or Illumination movie can spend weeks on the Netflix charts. But KPop Demon Hunters feels more plugged into the sensibilities of teenagers and young adults – the audience that seems to have dipped out for most recent Disney/Pixar titles – than any of those movies. It playfully engages with pop-music fandom, and to do that, you need tunes. Netflix may not sell tickets, but the KPop Demon Hunters has the first soundtrack of 2025 to hit the Billboard Top 10. Not every soundtrack cut is in the movie, but the movie still uses seven distinct numbers, mostly performed by characters in the movie rather than just soundtracking them. Even as a non-integrated musical (meaning there is an in-movie explanation for the presence of the songs), it’s the biggest animated musical since Encanto.

Like a lot of pop albums, the KPop Demon Hunters movie peaks early; it reaches such giddy, stylized highs as its lays out its characters, premise, and action style that its more serious-minded second half feels like it’s suddenly pivoted to a navel-gazing singer-songwriter record from someone who has better luck with pure bops. But at its best, the movie does the neat trick of plugging into the intensity of narrative-driven musicals with the immediacy of radio pop and the accompanying fandom. In a choice that’s both canny marketing and a smidge of critique, the fans of both groups play a big part in the movie, expressing their devotion with a fervor that borders on frightening at times, even though none of the girls would dare admit it out loud. In classic pop star fashion, they talk about loving their fans so often that it almost feels like they’re being forced at gunpoint. A more satirically-minded movie might key into the way that stan armies can start to feel like real ones, or depict the K-pop grind as more complicated than playfully exhausting musician hustle.

Still, that the songs belong to the fabric and milieu of the movie distinguishes it from the grown-up hustle of soundtracks so concerned with maximizing their chart impact that they have almost nothing to do with the movies themselves. F1 has a big soundtrack album featuring Doja Cat, and I defy anyone who saw the movie to tell me what scene that song underscores (if any; I’m honestly not sure). Most of the movie’s quasi-memorable music moments feature overplayed classic hits. It takes major confidence to avoid using them; recall Shrek shamelessly busting out cover of “Hallelujah” and “I’m a Believer” rather than risking its cred on originals. The K-pop numbers of Demon Hunters don’t strike me as “Bruno”-level masters of the movie-musical form, but at least the movie rethinks how to use music in family-friendly feature animation, which is very much not the case for the last couple of Disney musicals. It also might seem like opportunistic trend-chasing by comparison, but it’s hard to doubt the cross-cultural sincerity of KPop Demon Hunters – or its ability to tap into the hypnotic, near-fantastical power of pop engineering.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream KPop Demon Hunters on Netflix