kpop Demon Hunters is officially the most-streamed English movie in Netflix’s catalog. It is indeed one of the most surprising success stories of the year. A completely original animated musical has captured the hearts and minds of audiences,all while Sony and Netflix were woefully unprepared for it to blow up the way it has. It debunks conjecture that people aren’t interested in original animated features,and now that it has,we can examine why projects by Pixar,once the top dog in animation,haven’t hit the same way they used to.
Elio, Pixar’s sci-fi pseudo-isekai film about an orphaned boy looking for family among aliens, had the company’s worst-ever box office debut back in June, and as Pixar’s original movies continue to flounder and fail to gain an audience while a sequel like Inside Out 2 can be one of the highest-grossing animated films of all time, the narrative increasingly becomes “people don’t want original stories or ones too specific to a certain lived experience.” well, KPop Demon Hunters is a brand new story based in Korean mythology and is topping the charts for both movies and music, so that’s obviously not true. What’s the difference? Well, one KPop Demon Hunters artist has a theory.
Radford Sechrist is a story artist on KPop Demon Hunters,as well as the husband of director Maggie Kang. Sometiems he posts about art and animation on TikTok, and he had some insight as to why kpop Demon Hunters has been so accomplished while movies like Elio and even The Bad Guys 2, which had a pretty critically important drop in box office after its opening weekend, are struggling. Sechrist says that even though a lot of animated movies are marketed as “all-ages,” onyl so many of them are truly aiming for adults as well as kids. He then goes on to argue that, in order for an animated film to become a big pop culture phenomenon, it has to target people in their 20s and up, and it will then naturally