How KPop Demon Hunters Sent K-Pop Up the Global Charts

KPop Demon Hunters (케이팝 데몬 헌터스) is an animated musical made by Sony Pictures Animation for Netflix, which began streaming it on June 20, 2025. It follows Huntrix, a fictional K-pop girl group whose three members, Rumi, Mira and Zoey, secretly hunt demons. Their rivals are the Saja Boys, a boy group whose members are demons in disguise.¹

The story came from Maggie Kang (born Kang Min-ji, 강민지), who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Chris Appelhans. Kang was born in Seoul and moved to Toronto with her family at the age of five. She worked as a story artist at DreamWorks Animation before she pitched the idea in 2018.¹² She has called the film her "love letter to K-pop" and to her Korean background, and built its demon-hunter history on Korean shamanism, in which women sang and danced in rituals. She also cited Bong Joon-ho's monster film The Host (2006) as an influence.¹ In 2025 South Korea gave her the Okgwan Order of Cultural Merit.¹²

Two of the voice cast are Korean stars: Ahn Hyo-seop (안효섭) voices Jinu, the leader of the Saja Boys, and Lee Byung-hun (이병헌) voices the demon king Gwi-Ma, a role he repeated in the Korean dub.¹

Kang and Appelhans brought in working K-pop producers for the songs. Sony Pictures Animation producer Agnes Lee said she sought out Teddy (테디; real name Park Hong-jun, 박홍준) of The Black Label because the music of 2NE1 and BLACKPINK came to mind while she read the script.¹ Teddy began his career in the hip-hop group 1TYM and became known as a producer at YG Entertainment, of which The Black Label is a subsidiary.¹³¹⁵

"Golden" is credited to seven writers: Ejae (이재; real name Kim Eun-jae, 김은재), Mark Sonnenblick, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, 24 (real name Seo Jeong-hoon, 서정훈) and Teddy. Its producers were 24, Ido, Teddy and Ian Eisendrath.³ Ejae, who sings for Rumi, trained at SM Entertainment from 2003 without debuting, then wrote songs for acts including Red Velvet and TWICE.¹⁴ 24, also of The Black Label, accepted the Grammy for "Golden" on the team's behalf and gave his speech in English and Korean.¹⁵

Three members of TWICE (트와이스), Jeongyeon, Jihyo and Chaeyoung, sing the end-credits version of "Takedown", the album's lead single. The soundtrack also carries two earlier Korean releases, TWICE's "Strategy" and MeloMance's "Love, Maybe".²

The songs moved before the singles did. On the US Spotify daily chart dated July 3, 2025, the Saja Boys' "Your Idol" reached No. 1, the highest placing ever for a K-pop boy group and above BTS's 2020 peak with "Dynamite".⁸ "Golden" was released as a single on July 4 and topped the same chart on July 8, making Huntrix the first female K-pop group to do so.³

"Golden" reached No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 on the chart dated July 19, 2025, the first fictional act to lead it, and stayed there for 18 weeks, the most of any song that year.⁵² On the US Billboard Hot 100 it debuted at No. 81 and reached No. 1 on the chart dated August 16, 2025.³⁴ Billboard called it the ninth song associated with K-pop to top the Hot 100 and the first with female lead vocals; Vulture noted that the other eight were by BTS or its members. It spent eight weeks at No. 1 in all, the longest run by an animated act.³⁴

The rest of the album followed it up. The soundtrack became the first in the Hot 100's history to have four songs in the top 10 at once: "Golden", "Your Idol", "Soda Pop" and "How It's Done".¹ The album itself reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 on the chart dated September 20, 2025.⁶ In the UK, "Golden" became the second K-pop song to reach No. 1 on the Singles Chart, after PSY's "Gangnam Style", and held the top spot for ten weeks.³

At home in Korea, "Golden" reached No. 1 on the Circle Digital Chart. It also scored a perfect all-kill, meaning it was No. 1 on the real-time, daily and weekly parts of iChart, which combines the main Korean streaming services, all at the same time.³⁹ Its 1,484 hourly perfect all-kills are the most of any song.⁹

The official "Golden" lyric video on Sony Pictures Animation's channel passed one billion YouTube views in January 2026.³ It does not appear in DabPop's ranking of the most-viewed K-pop music videos on YouTube, which counts only official music videos by Korean artists. "Golden" has a lyric video, not a music video, and it is credited to a fictional group.

"Golden" won Best OST (original soundtrack song) at two Korean year-end music award shows, the 2025 MAMA Awards and the 2025 Melon Music Awards.¹¹ On February 1, 2026, it won Best Song Written for Visual Media at the 68th Grammy Awards, the first Grammy for a K-pop song. On March 15, 2026, it won Best Original Song at the 98th Academy Awards, the first Oscar for a K-pop song, and the film won Best Animated Feature.³¹¹

On streaming, the film passed the first season of Squid Game on September 3, 2025 to become Netflix's most-watched title, and finished its first 91 days with 325.1 million views.¹ That compares with 265.2 million for Squid Game's first season on Netflix's list of most-watched series.¹⁰ The data company Luminate reported that more than two-thirds of the soundtrack's audio streams came from outside the US.¹

Several writers have read the film as a new phase of the Korean Wave (Hallyu). Cho Jae-hyon of Hankook Ilbo wrote that it marks a shift to Korean-themed content made abroad rather than made in Korea and exported, and pointed to Kang, a Korean Canadian, drawing on her childhood memories of Korean content. Moon Dong-yeol of The Hankyoreh made a similar argument. Grace Kao, writing in Foreign Policy, noted the many Korean diaspora songwriters and artists who worked on it.¹

The film has also been linked to visits to Korea. The Korea Economic Daily reported that Seoul drew more than 1.36 million international tourists in July 2025, up 23.1% on July 2024 according to Seoul Metropolitan Government data, and credited the film in part. The National Museum of Korea drew more than five million visitors, a total also credited partly to the film.¹