When Maggie Kang first began developing what became the Netflix animated film KPop Demon Hunters, she found herself thinking a lot about her inner child.
Specifically, the 12-year-old girl she once was. That girl wasn’t a poised princess like so many of the popular Disney characters she’d see in popular media. She was goofy, could be messy and even a little gross, and wasn’t afraid to make herself seem silly for a laugh with her friends. The beauty of her girl gang wasn’t that they were perfect, it was that they were so far from it, and they didn’t care.
“If you’re going to be silly and make dumb faces, you need to do that with a crew who will embrace that part of you and laugh with you,” Kang, now a writer and director at Sony Pictures Animation, tells Glamour.
Kang channeled this version of her tween self when co-writing KPop Demon Hunters, specifically the main trio of characters, Rumi, Mira, and Zoey. The characters, who together make up the pop group HUNTR/X, have everything that makes them instant icons among young girls. They are beautiful, wear sparkly outfits, have cool hair (Rumi has a long, purple braid, Mira’s is a bright pink), and are great at singing.
But these girls are far from just style icons. Their KPop stardom is actually a cover for their real mission: ridding the world from demons that have plagued humanity for centuries. As the film explains, every generation a new group of women are tasked with battling off these demons by creating a barrier called the Honmoon—which they create through the beauty of their singing voices.
It turns out that Kang’s instincts were spot on. Girls not only wanted to watch a film about girls who were sparkly pop stars, but they wanted to watch those girls kick some serious ass. Since its premiere on Netflix on June 20, the film has taken over culture in a way that has Frozen’s Elsa and Anna shaking with irrelevance.
As a spokesperson for Netflix tells Glamour, the film has become the streamer’s most popular original animated film ever and is currently its second most popular movie overall. One of HUNTR/X’s original songs from the movie, “Golden,” hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and it’s now the first movie soundtrack since 1995’s Waiting To Exhale to have three songs in the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100.
In fact, HUNTR/X is now becoming one of the most successful girl groups of all time—they are the first since Destiny Child hit #1 on the Hot 100 with “Bootylicious” in August 2001 to top the chart.
But the film’s cultural relevance isn’t just borne out from statistics. If you’ve spent any time on the internet—or around a young girl—in the past few months you’ve seen how much it has permeated. On social media, parents joke about “Golden” hitting number one in their homes, show off their daughters’ Rumi-inspired sparkly braids, and are asking Reddit where exactly they can find HUNTR/X dolls or merch (there’s surprisingly little at this point, which we are sure will be rectified ASAP). And this weekend only, Netflix is releasing the film in theaters across the US for a special “sing-along event.”
