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If you don’t think the tale of KPop girl-group huntr/x – which sing songs by day and battles demons by night – is a good basis for a smash hit movie, you wouldn’t be alone.
Sony Pictures Animation – which developed the story – clearly didn’t have high hopes for it either.
To explain how we know this, we need to go back to a deal that was done in 2021.
While the likes of Disney, Paramount, HBO and MGM have all waded into the streaming video market, Sony is one of the few big studios to have steered clear.
But in 2021 it did agree a deal with Netflix, which essentially made Netflix the defacto streamer of Sony movies – for the next few years at least.
The deal had two parts – one side allowed Netflix to be the first streamer for Sony movies that had finished their run in the cinema. That would include the likes of paddington in Peru, Bad boys for Life, and the Venom series.
The other side of the deal – and the one that’s relevant here – gave Netflix dibs on any films Sony was making that it intended to launch directly to streaming or video on demand. As part of the deal, if Netflix was interested in a movie, it would cover the cost of its production and pay Sony a fee on top.
And that’s where KPop Demon Hunters came from.
Sony offered it to Netflix while it was still in the early stages of development in 2021 – because they clearly didn’t have much confidence that it would draw in enough of a crowd as a cinema release.
Netflix agreed to pay $100m to cover the cost of finishing the film – and then it paid a $20m fee to Sony.
Sony obviously thought was a good deal – and far better than the potential risk of a costly box office bomb.
Did Netflix realise it had a hit on its hands?
It doesn’t seem like it.
You might think that, having spent $120m on the movie, they would want to give it a big push and ensure it drew in viewers. But while $120m is a lot of money to most, it’s not really that big of a deal to Netflix.
The company previously said it was planning to spend $18 billion on content this year alone.
Another movie which came out this year – which Netflix did really try to push through ads and media campaigns – was The Electric State, which cost somewhere in the region of $320m to produce.
So $120m isn’t exactly budget-breaking for netflix.
And sure enough, when KPop Demon Hunters came out on 20th June, it happened with relatively little fanfare.
It did get prominent billing within the platform – but there wasn’t much in the way of a marketing campaign around the film’s release; there weren’t big billboards or TV ads, there wasn’t the media junket, or any kind of promotional tie-ins with other brands.These are all the kinds of things you tend to see a studio do when it’s pushing a new release.
Perhaps the most significant proof that they weren’t expecting a hit is the fact that they didn’t have any merchandise or toys ready either – a crucial piece of the puzzle for any film targeted at kids.
And they’re clearly now scrambling to fill that gap.
They have brought out some movie-related clothing lines and are now taking preorders on some Funko pop figures of characters from the movie… but they won’t be actually going out to customers until the start of next year.
If Netflix wasn’t really promoting it, how did it become such a hit?
A lot of that is being attributed to the fact that KPop as a genre has a huge global following, and a very committed one at that.
The film appears to have done a good job of representing the music and the culture that surrounds it, so it’s been embraced by the KPop community.
It also doesn’t hurt at all that the soundtrack is packed with really catchy songs – and the film itself,despite what the name suggests,is fairly upbeat and fun.
And that meant it leant itself to social media posts – with people using songs on Reels and TikToks, or attempting to mimic the characters’ dance routines. Many parents jokingly posted about how they had become inadvertently hooked on the soundtrack after overhearing their kids listening to it.
Next thing you know,it became a bona fide smash hit.
Last week Netflix said it had racked up 236 million total views so far – making it the streamer’s most popular movie ever.
That’s five million more views than Red Noticewhich came out four years ago, and got a major marketing push from Netflix. It also featured what was at the time an A-list cast including Dwayne ‘The Rock’ johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds. It was basically created in a lab to be a blockbuster hit.
But KPop Demon Hunters has not just been a hit within the Netflix platform; one of the songs from it – ‘Golden’ – has topped music charts around the world – including the Billboard charts in the US.
As it stands, four of the top ten songs in the Billboard charts are from the film – the first time a soundtrack has managed to do that.
On the back of the success Netflix also had a limited cinema release of a singalong version –
