Original, IP, and Where That Line Blurs
How K-POP DEMON HUNTERS Leveraged A Built-In Fanbase to Glowing Success
It’s easy to understand why there have been so many discussions and think pieces featuring Pixar’s ELIO (2025) and Sony Pictures Animation and Netflix’s K-POP DEMON HUNTERS (2025). It’s an obvious case study—it is interesting to analyze these separately and in relation to each other. I dislike how this has led to the films being seen as in competition with each other when they had such different release strategies and target audiences too. I won’t be talking about ELIO in this piece, but rather the dual use of originality and IP in K-POP DEMON HUNTERS.
We’re In Our IP Era
You’re probably aware that studios have been heavily relying on their existing Intellectual Property—their back catalog of characters and stories to create new projects. Disney’s Descendants franchise and TCG Lorcana pool all of their classic villain and hero lore into new worlds just like Kingdom Hearts or Once Upon A Time did years ago. Warner Brothers’ Velma was a new aged-up story featuring the Scooby-Doo gang while the recently announced Go-Go Mystery Machine series will be yet another new take. We’re seeing sports teams and leagues collaborate with popular anime IP like One Piece hoping to catch a piece of that fanbase. We’re on our seventh Jurassic Park film, and there have been two very well-received animated series set in the same world as the films. DreamWorks has officially entered the chat with live-action remakes. And the numbers don’t lie. People largely show up for these films. Even when people clocked the poor reception of SNOW WHITE (2025) and resulting buzz of Disney Live Action possibly rethinking its slate, LILO AND STITCH (2025) put to bed any murmurs of complete abandonment of the adaptations. Overall, legacy has been a successful strategy.
So who wouldn’t be excited that two original animated features were both wide released on the same day?! Two!?
While ELIO’s opening weekend ticket sales weren’t strong, K-POP DEMON HUNTER soared to #1 on Netflix’s internal scoreboard. Both films were praised, but K-POP undoubtedly won the cultural conversation. Would those numbers have converted to ticket sales had it been released theatrically? I don’t know. I think a decent enough chunk. At the very least, it would have had amazing word-of-mouth and potentially had legs. At the same time, the barrier to entry of it being “free” at home made it far more accessible, opening it up to more casual viewers.
Now, I don’t know what the deal structure is between SPA and Netflix. Part of me wonders if they’d had the choice between theatrical or Netflix, would they have taken a chance on theatrical? What would a successful box office run have been for K-POP? In general, it didn’t look like it would have been a bank-breaking production. Respectfully, truly, it didn’t look like an overly complex film like SPIDER-VERSE, but rather a (still great looking) traditional, physically-based rendered film, maybe $70-80mm if I had to guess. Normally with theatrically released films, the rule of thumb is to double the production budget and that’s your marketing budget. But again, with Netflix being “free” they likely don’t spend as much externally since they can just spam your Netflix profile with its new offerings. Many people online feel that Pixar didn’t spend enough on ELIO’s marketing. Living in LA, working in the industry, and having friends at Pixar, I have a very warped perspective on that where I can’t really comment.
IP Without IP
But something else I know helped K-POP DEMON HUNTERS is that… it’s not entirely an original, right?
If we lived in a world of true binaries, yes, it is an original more than it is IP. In reality, it’s both.
In an industry where we are saturated in IP and adaptations, we also do know that we still have to make new stories (that ideally become new IP and franchises to add to our libraries). So the way we make originals has become significantly more calculated in this way.
There are shows that rely on the music catalogs of popular bands, such as these preschool shows that feature the music of The Beatles and Motown but still have completely original stories:
Animated feature films are loaded with celebrity voices because we treat those celebrity’s clout as extra marketing, as IP. Sometimes that can backfire when there’s a controversy with said famous person (RIP every in-development Neil Gaiman project, probably), and sometimes studios don’t want to pay for likeness (RIP Giselle from ENCHANTED (2007)). ANYONE BUT YOU (2023) had solid word-of-mouth because people felt it was a return to form for the much-missed rom-com genre. For a long time, Pixar was able to count on its own name as marketing, as IP—a quality assurance stamp to get butts in theaters. While positively received, ELIO proved that isn’t enough.
The K-pop aspect was the last piece of the development pitch of K-POP according to creator and director Maggie Kang (who co-directed the film with Chris Appelhans), but it was the crucial element both story-wise and marketing-wise. Once that was established, they were banking on the existing fanbase of Korean pop music fans. While the music in K-POP DEMON HUNTERS is original, it is heavily inspired by some of the top acts of today. The film heavily leaned into tropes common in K-pop bands, as well as in K-dramas. Three of the nine members of actual group TWICE covered one of the film’s original songs and were used in promotional material:
Hell, Nickelodeon was trying to capitalize on the steady but growing fanbase of K-pop fans over a decade ago with their live-action series Make It Pop (2015) which featured a fictional band singing songs with elements borrowed from the K-pop groups at the time:
Netflix has also been heavily investing in its Korean content, with a YouTube channel “Netflix K-Content” established in 2019 that currently sits at 5.3m subscribers. In an article from The Korean Herald, the K-pop industry brought in $900m in 2023 with projections expecting continued growth. Also in 2023, Netflix announced that it was investing $2.5 billion on South Korean projects over four years due to the international appeal of its reality shows and K-dramas (not to mention the popularity of PARASITE (2019) and Squid Game (2021)). Netflix is also a studio that lacks a deep library like legacy studios Warner Brothers Discovery or The Walt Disney Company, nor the incredible specificity YouTube can afford its audience due to its content being user-generated. Netflix has had to find spaces to carve out for itself, and Korean shows is one of them, as “…About three-fifths of Netflix’s users have watched a Korean show, and viewing time for those programs has grown six-fold in just four years, he (Ted Sarandos) said. About 90% of the viewers for Korean romance-genre content hail from abroad, Sarandos said.” Somewhere on the Netflix servers there is a 5-year franchise strategy deck (where Netflix’s Korean media is broadly treated as a franchise in itself) where this movie slotted perfectly into.
Like I said earlier, I wish we could somehow run a simulation where K-POP DEMON HUNTERS was released theatrically. I don’t know if it would have had quite the same explosive numbers it did opening weekend on Netflix (in that I don’t think every person who watched would have bought a movie ticket), but I have no doubt that it would have had legs due to its solid, fun story, lovable feral gorgeous leads, insanely catchy songs, and again, positive word of mouth. Current K-pop bands/members have tweeted about and covered some of the dances from the film at shows and on TikTok. Seven of its songs are currently sitting on the Billboard Hot 100. But I get it… box office is so tricky and unpredictable. Even with the algorithm Netflix has, success on there can also be tricky. But I’m so grateful that K-POP DEMON HUNTERS has not only been seen, but thoroughly loved and celebrated. ART BOOK WHEN, SONY?
When I nit-pick about the film heavily relying on existing media/genre, I’m not saying this to devalue the originality of K-POP DEMON HUNTERS at all. I just think that’s a crucial piece of its success people aren’t talking about. Whatever percentage, if you will, of IP you are bringing into a project, be it certain genre tropes and/or conventional moments or a 1:1 adaptation, it still requires an immense amount of talent and creativity to do it well. I’m grateful that it was seen as a project worth taking a chance on, especially in this very contracted moment in the film industry. And I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we get a fun sing-along theatrical release of K-POP DEMON HUNTERS, maybe during it’s campaigning for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song?