Control · Fall 2026Page 80 of 100.THE REVIEW
Silhouetted concertgoers raise their hands toward bright, hazy stage lights.
Raised hands in silhouette against a wash of stage light. The film earned its enormous audience the old way, with songs good enough to make strangers reach for the ceiling.The photograph is by Filipe Braggio on Pexels.

Review

Netflix’s biggest hit ever was a cartoon about a girl band.

Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans’s KPop Demon Hunters is a bright, funny animated musical that earned its enormous audience more honestly than most hits do.

Written by CONTROL

This article runs 436 words and takes about two minutes to read.

7out of 10
Film
KPop Demon Hunters
By
Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans
From
Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation, 2025

Nobody planned for this. KPop Demon Hunters arrived on Netflix in June 2025 with modest promotion, a premise that sounded like a pitch-meeting dare and no stars an adult would recognize from a poster. By the end of the year it was the most-watched title in the service’s history, its song “Golden” had topped the Billboard Hot 100, and its choreography had become a playground fixture. In March 2026 it won the Academy Award for animated feature.

The premise is simple and a little brilliant. Huntr/x is a three-woman pop group whose members secretly protect the world from demons by singing, because their voices sustain a magical barrier called the Honmoon. The demons respond by forming a rival boy band, the Saja Boys, to steal the fans and with them the barrier’s strength. The group’s leader, Rumi, has a secret of her own: she is half demon, and the markings spreading across her skin are something she has been taught to hide.

A dense crowd of young people raise their hands toward a dark stage at a concert.
A crowd reaches toward a stage. KPop Demon Hunters understands that a pop audience is a kind of power, which is exactly what its demons try to steal.The photograph is by Shelagh Murphy on Pexels.

Why it worked

The film, made by Sony Pictures Animation, borrows the restless visual grammar of that studio’s Spider-Verse pictures and adapts it to the gloss of a K-pop music video, with snapping expressions, blown-out colors and fight scenes cut like dance breaks. It is genuinely funny, particularly in its small physical jokes about three famous young women who eat like teenagers. And the songs are real songs, written and produced to the standard of the industry the film is gently teasing rather than as parodies of it.

What gives the film its hold, though, is Rumi’s shame. Beneath the fan-service and the demon fights is a plain story about a young woman who has been told that part of herself is a threat to the people she loves, and who has spent her life performing an acceptable version of herself for an audience. That is a story the millions of teenagers who watched it on repeat understood at once.

Several raised arms, one with a wristwatch, reach up above a blurred concert crowd.
Arms lifted in the dark. Beneath the fights and the fan service, the film is about a performer hiding part of herself from the people cheering for her.The photograph is by Luis Quintero on Pexels.

Where it runs thin

The mythology is sketchy, the villain is a looming face with little to say, and the romance with the Saja Boys’ leader, Jinu, is resolved in a way that feels hurried. At ninety-five minutes the film has room for its songs and not much for its ideas. It is a very good pop record with a story attached, which is not a small achievement, but it is not the masterpiece its numbers imply.

The verdict: Watch it with whoever in your house is under fifteen, and let them explain the choreography. You will come away with a song you cannot shake and a better sense of why they love it.