{"id":118983,"date":"2025-08-29T18:11:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T18:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/118983\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T18:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T18:11:08","slug":"kpop-demon-hunters-artist-weighs-in-on-why-its-so-successful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/118983\/","title":{"rendered":"KPop Demon Hunters Artist Weighs In On Why It\u2019s So Successful"},"content":{"rendered":"

KPop Demon Hunters<\/a> is officially the most-streamed English movie in Netflix\u2019s catalog<\/a>. It is one of the most surprising success stories of the year. A completely original animated musical has captured the hearts and minds of audiences, all while Sony and Netflix were woefully unprepared for it to blow up the way it has. It debunks conjecture that people aren\u2019t interested in original animated features, and now that it has, we can examine why projects by Pixar, once the\u00a0 top dog in animation, haven\u2019t hit the same way they used to<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Elio, Pixar\u2019s sci-fi pseudo-isekai<\/a> film about an orphaned boy looking for family among aliens, had the company\u2019s worst-ever box office debut<\/a> back in June, and as Pixar\u2019s original movies continue to flounder and fail to gain an audience while a sequel like Inside Out 2 can be one of the highest-grossing animated films of all time<\/a>, the narrative increasingly becomes \u201cpeople don\u2019t want original stories or ones too specific to a certain lived experience.\u201d Well, KPop Demon Hunters<\/a> is a brand new story based in Korean mythology and is topping the charts for both movies and music, so that\u2019s obviously not true. What\u2019s the difference? Well, one KPop Demon Hunters artist has a theory.<\/p>\n

Radford Sechrist is a story artist on KPop Demon Hunters, as well as the husband of director Maggie Kang. Sometimes he posts about art and animation on TikTok, and he had some insight as to why KPop Demon Hunters has been so successful while movies like Elio and even The Bad Guys 2, which had a pretty significant drop in box office after its opening weekend, are struggling. Sechrist says that even though a lot of animated movies are marketed as \u201call-ages,\u201d only so many of them are truly aiming for adults as well as kids. He then goes on to argue that, in order for an animated film to become a big pop culture phenomenon, it has to target people in their 20s and up, and it will then naturally trickle down to children through platforms like YouTube and TikTok.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the issue is that kids only watch shows where they\u2019re seeing people talking about it on YouTube, and the people talking about it on YouTube are in their 20s,\u201d Sechrist says. \u201cSo if you\u2019re developing a movie, you kind of have to think about people in their 20s first before the kids will even hear of the movie. So things like anime, Stranger Things, you have to sort of shoot for that age of demographic and you have to get people in their 20s excited so they\u2019re talking about it. Then the kids will see that, and as long as you don\u2019t put anything in the movie that\u2019s too much for a kid\u2014but let\u2019s be honest, there\u2019s like 5-year-olds watching Stranger Things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sechrist points out that some of the most notable exceptions to this are in animation targeting pre-school children, or in shows like Bluey, which are aimed at children but engage in enough adult themes that parents gladly watch the show alongside their kids. Anecdotally, when I went to see KPop Demon Hunters for its singalong screenings<\/a>, the kid to adult ratio in the crowds wasn\u2019t exactly lopsided. I went with a group of adults, and we weren\u2019t the only childless party at those screenings. My friend even joked that she forgot the movie was \u201cfor kids\u201d until we arrived at the theater because its fandom has transcended age. That speaks to the truth of Sechrist\u2019s theory that KPop Demon Hunters\u2019 adult appeal, which it establishes through adult themes, quality animation, and music you\u2019d actually listen to outside of the movie, has helped it break past the \u201ckids movie\u201d bubble that movies like Elio may be stuck in. He says that he would encourage Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks, and anyone else working on an animated property to consider if something is reaching the 20s-and-up demographic, or if they want it to be so specific in its younger audience that it never escapes those trappings.<\/p>\n

Pixar\u2019s box office trajectory has become a big topic in conversations about the state of animation writ large, but some nuance is lost when you ignore that several of Pixar\u2019s movies have been released on Disney+ alongside a limited theatrical release in the years since the covid-19 pandemic. In any case, Pixar\u2019s upcoming projects are pretty sequel heavy, with Toy Story 5, Incredibles 3, and Coco 2 all in the works. The studio\u2019s next movie, an Avatar-like story called Hoppers<\/a>, is coming to theaters on March 6.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KPop Demon Hunters is officially the most-streamed English movie in Netflix\u2019s catalog. It is one of the most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":118984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,2696,206],"class_list":["post-118983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-kpop-demon-hunters","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}