“Before I joined HUNTR/X, I felt like my thoughts and my lyrics and all my notebooks were just useless and weird. But with the two of you, they mean something. I mean something.”
A month or so ago, an unassuming movie from Sony Pictures Animation titled “KPop Demon Hunters” was released on Netflix to little fanfare. Now, after the film’s soundtrack has just hit #1 on the Billboard Top 100 and recently set the new viewership record for the most viewed Netflix film of all time, on top of reaching #1 at the box office, it seems like as good a time as any to talk about this movie.
The plot follows a trio of K-pop idols named Rumi (voiced by Arden Cho), Mira (voiced by May Hong) and Zoey (voiced by Ji-young Yoo), who together make up the girl band HUNTR/X. While they fill stadiums by day, their real job is working as a group of demon hunters by singing to create a magical barrier called the Honmoon. The demon king Gwi-ma (voiced by Lee Byung-hun, who plays the frontman in “Squid Game” and is the star of Park Chan-wook’s 2025 film “No Other Choice”) will stop at nothing to defeat humanity, and he gets an idea from the enterprising demon Jinu (voiced by Ahn Hyo-seop) to fight fire with fire and create a K-pop demon boy band called the “Saja Boys.”
I will be honest that I watched this film on a whim due to the passionate online fervor, and I was quite impressed by it. While the premise may be quite out there, the movie is compelling and won me over rather quickly. Although the film may be cheesy and full of tropes, it is earnest and embraces them in stride. Why not have a romance subplot torn straight out of a K-Drama, and a final battle ripped from “Sailor Moon” if it all works together?
The visual style of the film is stylized and punchy, with many similarities to Sony’s “Spider-Verse” series and modern anime being readily apparent. One of the movie’s directors, Maggie Kang, worked to make the film true to Korean culture, and she succeeded at that by including traditional foods and music, making the movie feel so much more authentic.
The most notable aspect of the movie is the original song compositions.
Although I may not be familiar with K-pop (with my only frame of reference being PSY, of “Gangnam Style” fame), I cannot deny how catchy and incredible all the music for the film is. While my personal favorite song from the film is “Soda Pop,” most of the internet seems to have settled on “Golden” and “Your Idol” as their favorites, and propelled them to the highest position on the charts for a song from a film since Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Encanto” (2021). Far too often in films, the original songs rarely sound like they would actually be hits, and this movie has a whole album of them. Also, like all great movie musicals, it is incredibly rewatchable.
Due to how unpredictable the race for Best Animated Feature has been this year before now, this film is our first mainstay of the category at awards ceremonies, and “Golden” will also put up a good fight in the Best Original Song category.
This is by far the most fun I have had watching a film from 2025 so far, and it is always nice when the internet falls in love with a movie that actually deserves the hype. I sincerely hope those rumored sequels will turn out well. My final rating for “KPop Demon Hunters” is a catchy 9/10.
