There will be no shortage of think-pieces trying to explain why K-Pop Demon Hunters might be the hit of the summer of 2025, in the midst of despite theatrical titans like Superman and Fantastic Four. Some speculate it’s the TikTok-ification of culture, others suggest it’s what happens when genre-savvy audiences finally get a film that understands how we consume media now: in memes, moodboards, motion. But the truth is simpler.
Like the Spider-Verse films before it, K-Pop Demon Hunters is just… awesome. It looks good. It moves with a kind of frictionless grace. It sounds like a banger. It clears all the base-level aesthetic checks and then slides into something higher, stranger, better. It’s a bop.
It nails the little things. Names like Rumi, Mira, and Zoey repeat often enough in the script to burn themselves into memory, the way pop lyrics do. Their designs are iconic already, distinct, poster-ready silhouettes that remind you these girls were idols before they were avatars. You can practically see the merch materialize mid-scene: the figures, the lightsticks, the lenticular stickers that’ll glitter on the backs of school notebooks across three continents.
I didn’t walk into K-Pop Demon Hunters out of personal fervor. I was swept in like a leaf on the tide of group chats. It’s the kind of Netflix moment that happens maybe once or twice a year: a limited-release, algorithm-assisted media object that everyone ends up seeing, whether they meant to or not. For me, that meant hearing about it from my nieces, my goddaughter, my friend’s very online 10-year-old, and that one friend who sends fan art before the trailer even drops.
Let’s be clear: I’m a fan of animation. I wrote recently about Only Yesterday, and my shortlist of films that live rent-free in my bloodstream includes everything by Satoshi Kon, most of Miyazaki, all of Shinkai, and Scavenger’s Reign—which felt like what might happen if Moebius and Terrence Malick got lost in space and forgot the way home. I’m hyped for Genndy Tartakovsky’s Fixed next month. Animation is a language I speak, fluently and emotionally. I even buy the posters.
K-pop? I’ve never memorized full choreography, but I did survive a BTS concert with my goddaughter (she cried; I bought merch). Being half-Japanese means idol culture has always been ambient noise, always humming somewhere behind the daily scroll. Even if you don’t think you consume K-pop, if you’re alive in 2025, it’s already in your media diet. You just didn’t read the label.
I also go way back—I was a Macross fan. I’m used to the idea of music as metaphor, music as weapon, music as culture in the purest sense: shared, exported, borrowed, sometimes stolen, always powerful.
In K-Pop Demon Hunters, the girl group is on a concert tour that doubles as an exorcism circuit. Their microphones are weapons. Their dance moves are runes. Their fan chants are holy. Every show is both a performance and a trap. The enemies are nameless mobs, the kind of spiritual malware that fill in the gaps wherever empathy dies. The fight scenes? They’re not tense—outcomes are never really in doubt—but they’re slick, polished, and thematically on point. Friendship here is literal power. Belonging is a shield.
It’s a collage of poses, pigtails, and purifications. And it never asks whether it’s “too much,” because it knows the answer. It is. It’s too much eyeliner. Too much choreography. Too many demons. Not enough sleep. The Sony DNA is obvious, those Spider-Verse lines and color bleeds, but KPDH goes even more kinetic, like it’s playing at 1.5x speed and dares you to keep up.
And yes, it’s cute. Like, legitimately heartwarming. Because for all the polish and neon flash, the film rests on a deeply anime-core foundation: the unshakable power of friendship and kinship, and belonging, sincere and uncorrupted. The kind that doesn’t apologize for sentiment. That believes, quietly, radically, that kindness is a force, that good still matters.
There’s even a moral spine here, beneath the glitter. In an era when division is weaponized hourly, K-Pop Demon Hunters asks us not to judge people for their worst day. To listen. To find common ground even in hellscapes. And if that doesn’t work? Well. Then we kill demons. The ones without names, without curiosity, without any desire to be better. Kindness must be vigilant. Good is worth fighting for.
But the part that stole my heart? It wasn’t the fights. Not the songs. Not the vibes-per-second speed of the film. It was the unnecessary stuff. The kind of nonsense that could’ve been cut without consequence, but instead made everything feel deeper, stranger, more resonant. I’m talking about the demon cat and the bird. A tiger and a magpie (with a sweet hat). These two could’ve stepped out of a Miyazaki sidebar. They add nothing in that they could be removed from the film entirely but would be made lesser for it and instead they are everything. They’re the glue of wonder, the unexpected flourish that makes the film feel not just big, but alive. It’s the feeling magical realism in a full blown fantasy. They could have easily been cut but it was imperative that they weren’t.
And the song? They’re bops. They threaten to be the soundtrack of the summer of 2025 and even more probably a blue print other films will try to follow after the success of this one, a true melding of blockbuster filming (if this was in theaters it would have been huge) and streaming it thing with true pop song hits that infiltrate the culture and cannot be avoided, nor do you want to.
You don’t watch K-Pop Demon Hunters. You survive it. You sing along. You post. You meme. You google for the merch. And somewhere along the way, you remember what it feels like to believe in something good, something joyful, something louder than evil. This summer?
Get off the couch. Be obsessed. This is not just a fad or glitz, this is thus far one of the best movies of the year that I’ve seen along with Sinners, The Shrouds, and (edited) Warfare.