A confession: until I was recently informed that it is now the most-watched film in the history of Netflix, I hadn’t once heard of KPop Demon Hunters. The animated film even boasts the first soundtrack in history to place four songs in the Billboard Top 10 at the same time, and a single sing-along weekend run recently topped the UK box office. Yet, honest to God, I had never seen a single thing about it.
In the past, this would have made me hopelessly out of touch. But this is 2025, some three decades into the official internet, and the idea of a single shared culture has all but disappeared. I’d similarly heard absolutely nothing about the film Demon Hunters unseated from Netflix’s charts, 2021’s Red Notice. Increasingly, the enormous mass cultural reach of the major broadcast mediums of the twentieth century seems like a dream. We live in a world of infinite siloed cultural movements; the “mainstream” is getting thinner and thinner.
Ask yourself: when was the last genuine monocultural event? Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour? Barbenheimer? The final season of Game of Thrones? It’s not that we aren’t consuming enough media. No period has ever consumed as much. But the internet has a way of dividing us into specific cultural niches, much as it tends to isolate us in reality. A recent poll showed that 37 per cent of children spend more than six hours a day on their phone, and 6 per cent spent more than ten hours. Some 90 per cent of British children own a smartphone by their 11th birthday. Children’s language is more incomprehensible to adults than ever before. But such fragmentation seems irrevocably built into the world this extraordinary technology has created for us.
Perhaps none of these trends would matter if Demon Hunters was simply a deeper or more interesting film. Yet it seems all too deliberately designed to cater to these depressing trends. When I sat down to watch it, the blitzkrieg of processed slop songs, hyper-edited fight sequences and music video montages overwhelmed my synapses. The film had obviously been made for people with the shortest attention spans imaginable. The film’s titular hunters are a fictional K-Pop (Korean pop) trio, HUNTR/X. At the beginning of the film, the group has just wrapped up a world tour. But villains soon arrive, in the form of a literal demon boy band called the Saja Boys, who must be defeated and banished from Earth through musical performance.
On the one hand, the film points to a potential relocation of mass culture: over the past decade, K-Pop has steamrolled its way into success throughout the Anglophone world. Since 2019, the genre has had its very own category at the Video Music Awards. At this past Sunday’s awards, the voices behind HUNTR/X – EJAE, Rei Ami and Audrey Nuna – presented the Album of the Year prize. Of course, K-Pop has been dominant on its home turf for a long time. The genre’s most manic followers – called saesang fans in Korean – are famous for swarming on the slightest criticism online, breaking into stars’ houses and even indulging in the occasional violent demonstration in support of their chosen artist.
Yet a lot of K-Pop songs tell a depressingly familiar story of pop stardom. Take the highest-charting single from Demon Hunters’s soundtrack – the song which serves as the group’s biggest hit in its own fictional plot – “Golden”. Never mind that the song sounds like it could have been created by an AI. The first time it plays, the film lingers over the drooling faces of HUNTR/X fans, bowled over by its apparent brilliance. In the song, the trio – who are, to be clear, already massively famous – position themselves as young women who struggled and finally realised “the queen they were born to be”. Now they fly in literal golden jets and command legions of fans and deserve to do so.
Anthems of personal achievement like this have become ubiquitous in modern pop music. For the past two decades at least, we’ve been beset by countless versions of the most popular, wealthy, adored people in the world – think Taylor Swift, surely the great genius of the form – singing about how difficult it is to find themselves and follow their dreams. KPop Demon Hunters is no different, and seems entirely geared towards young pubescent fans already prepared to believe they live in a world where beautiful, shiny people deserve the adoration showered on them, because of their narcissistic obsession with self-realisation.
Except that, in reality, K-Pop success has little to do with self-actualisation or dream-following. The Korean pop industry more often seems like a demented cross between Soviet Olympic gymnastics programs and the Mickey Mouse Club. Children as young as ten are recruited by talent agencies and sent off to specialist schools resembling boot camp star factories. Contracts typically last seven years and involve arduous training in singing, dancing and acting. Western children who left the schools midway through training have reported punishing conditions, as have many investigative documentarians. With such sheer capital behind the K-Pop industry, Western stars are understandably struggling to keep up. Only small economies like a Swift or a Dua Lipa can really match the sheer global reach and celebrity of the biggest K-Pop stars.
The most unnerving thing about Demon Hunters is that it appears so unbothered by this darker reality. The film’s popstars are portrayed as overworked and exhausted. They use every available break to pile up junk food, are forced to disguise themselves in public and desperately look forward to long days rotting on their skyscraper penthouse couch. In the film, this is all very cheery and goofy, clearly designed to be relatable to stressed-out young women the world over. Still, it is taken as understood that it is perfectly fine to train young pop stars and sell their talent as a corporate spectacle to stadiums full of unhinged fans desperate for a collective experience – so long as said young pop stars can battle their demons (in this case literally) and gain a shallowly cinematic version of self-esteem.
Now, it’s entirely possible I’m worrying too much. It may not have naturally appeared on my radar, yet the streaming figures suggest this film has come close to that very kind of monocultural event we seem to be lacking these days. Even though it may have been cynically built to exploit a global fandom and the pop music charts, all the families sitting down to watch the film together (or, perhaps, letting it run in the background) must have enjoyed it. And hey, those songs sure are infernally catchy. At least it’s not Minions 13, right?
But still, for a film whose plot involves an ancient demon underworld stealing the souls of Earthlings, the most disturbing element of Demon Hunters is the subtle message that keeps poking through its bright, frenetic surface: that there’s nothing wrong, or even essentially exploitative, about contemporary fame, as long as our pop idols remain successful avatars of a vaguely therapeutic kind of self-realisation. Yes, we can partially humanise them, and even expect them to be performatively vulnerable – but we still expect them to be triumphant. And if Korea’s ruthless, algorithm-ready production of stars keeps churning out music like this, while media conglomerates like Netflix and Sony keep providing young people with narratives that obscure the reality behind it, then who knows? K-Pop might one day be the only show left in town. But it will not be a benevolent one.
[See also: Labubu and the infantilisation of the West]
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