‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Beaten By ‘Squid Game’ And ‘Stranger Things.’ Here’s How

Saying that KPop Demon Hunters is a success is somewhat of an understatement. The animated movie tells the story of a Korean girl group with a secret side hustle of battling demons and this surreal premise has catapulted it into the position of being Netflix’s most-watched original animated film. Popular as it may be, it still only has a fraction of the pulling power of Netflix’s most-established franchises.

Scarcely a day goes by without a report emerging about a new record being broken by KPop Demon Hunters. Since it debuted in June, the movie has notched up 350.9 million views worldwide and, as this report explained, its viewership has increased weekly, a feat rarely achieved by other Netflix originals.

The movie’s dazzling visuals are only part of its magic formula. Its punchy pop soundtrack has also fueled its popularity. In order to make the movie more authentic, the producers enlisted the help of Teddy Park, known for his work with Blackpink, and Grammy-winning German song-writer Michel Lindgren Schulz, who has worked with K-pop groups BTS and TWICE.

They did such a good job that KPop Demon Hunters had the highest debut for a soundtrack so far this year on the Billboard 200 in the United States. It was a similar story on Spotify in the U.S. where ‘Golden’, a song sung by the movie’s eponymous super group, reached the top spot, surpassing real-life superstars Blackpink to become the highest-charting female K-pop group.

Last week the movie cast an even wider spell when a “sing-along” version of it was released in theaters. Remarkably, it beat Weapons, Freakier Friday and Fantastic Four to win the weekend box office with a haul of $18 million even though it played for only two days in 1,700 theaters which is around half of what major releases usually get. This propelled it to its highest level of popularity and it came almost completely out of the blue.

As this report explained, not a single article was written about KPop Demon Hunters over the first three months of this year, according to Factiva, a search engine owned by Dow Jones which includes content from 33,000 news, data and information sources in 32 languages.

This is reflected in data from Google Trends which analyzes the popularity of top search queries. It shows that as recently as the week of May 11, KPop Demon Hunters had a score of less than one which is the lowest possible level.

However, this week, driven by the success of the movie in theaters, it has reached peak popularity with a score of 100. This represents the maximum relative interest worldwide rather than the absolute number of searches, and it took KPop Demon Hunters little more than three months to get there from a standing start.

However, a very different picture emerges when KPop Demon Hunters is ranked against Squid Game and Stranger Things, two of Netflix’s most-established brands. As this chart shows, over the past decade, the retro-inspired Stranger Things is the only one of the three which has taken the top spot of 100 and it did so in July 2022 on the release of season four, volume two.

Survival thriller series Squid Game hit a peak of 91 in October 2021, the month after it debuted. By then it had become Netflix’s most-viewed series, drawing 111 million fans since its launch, so the surge in searches makes sense. In contrast, KPop Demon Hunters has only just hit its high which stands at only 24 so it still has a long way to go before it reaches the relative heady heights of Squid Game and Stranger Things. However, time is on its side.

Squid Game has already come to a close and the fifth season of Stranger Things in November is set to bring the curtain down on the series. KPop Demon Hunters is only just getting started as Netflix is developing two animated sequels as well as a live action remake, an animated TV series and even a stage musical. Each instalment should build on the hype for the franchise keeping it in the running for the top spot.