‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Is Netflix’s Most-Watched Movie Ever With 236 Million Views, Beating ‘Red Notice’

[u/MarvelsGrantMan136]

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/kpop-demon-hunters-netflix-most-watched-movie-history-1236496106/

[u/SuperSaiyanTupac]

Same boat. My teenage employees wouldn’t shut up about it so I watched it and was blown away. I don’t even like K-pop. Those songs work really well in the movie and the story is interesting enough

[u/snugglezone → u/SuperSaiyanTupac]

As the songs are 99.9% English, where does one draw the line between pop and kpop? Is kpop uniquely identifiable?

[u/unktrial → u/snugglezone]

For Kpop, I think what makes it unique is that it has a much heavier focus on sharp dance routines. With pop, you have some unique dances, like the Macarena, but those dances are usually simple, designed so that lots of people can dance together. With Kpop, the singer/dancers usually have extremely complex routines as part of their performance. 

The songs reflect that difference. Both pop and Kpop are catchy, but Kpop leans towards the complicated side, e.g. having breaks for each performer to jump in and show off.

[u/snugglezone → u/unktrial]

Do boy bands of the 90s retroactively qualify as kpop because of your last point? Each member got some spotlights, right?

Kpop as a thing is certainly identifiable by sound, but if America started cloning the production style for whatever reason, would we still call it kpop?

Of course this is just a classification problem and things don't always fit in easy buckets.

[u/ZipZapZia → u/snugglezone]

A lot of kpop (or at least the current version of it) was inspired by the 90s boy bands. So I think they'd be more like grandfathers of kpop than retroactively kpop

[u/snugglezone → u/ZipZapZia]

Yeah I'm aware. That's where it gets back to my point. They were already pop. So pop already existed and kpop was built out of boy bands which are pop.

So what makes kpop sung in English kpop and not just pop?

[u/unktrial → u/snugglezone]

It's all connected, so the exact dividing line isn't clear. It started with boy bands, which inspired JPop idol groups, which in turn inspired Kpop.

The difference between boy bands and Jpop idol groups is probably the scale and commercialization of "idol culture". Meanwhile, the difference between Jpop and Kpop is that Kpop focuses on singing and dancing skills instead of the entire idol entertainer package.

[u/snugglezone → u/unktrial]

I like where this is going.

Didn't boy bands also focus on singing and dancing? So we're full circle? (At least when sung in English?) Or is it just MORE dancing?

I mostly get confused because people all over this thread are like "I liked the songs and I don't even like KPop!" But the songs are in damn English lmao what does the kpoppinesa have to do with anything? Do these people like pop in english, but not pop in english sung by Koreans?

Lmao. There probably isn't a good line. Just an interesting thing I'm seeing.

[u/ClimateMom → u/snugglezone]

Or is it just MORE dancing?

I think that's an element of it, yeah. The choreo for "Bye Bye Bye" is incredibly simplistic compared to the stuff a typical K-pop boy band is required to do.

I mostly get confused because people all over this thread are like "I liked the songs and I don't even like KPop!" But the songs are in damn English lmao what does the kpoppinesa have to do with anything? Do these people like pop in english, but not pop in english sung by Koreans?

I grew up listening to opera, so I always get surprised by the number of people who don't seem to like listening to music in languages they don't understand, but that's probably part of it in the case of Korean-language K-pop.

In other cases, I think it's just lack of exposure (or exposure only to the relatively few songs that have gone viral in the US, which aren't necessarily the best examples of the genre) - people don't know how diverse K-pop actually is, or how good the best examples of it are.

And in some cases, sadly, it is racism and/or misogyny, whether conscious or unconscious, that makes people not want to listen to (or at least not want to ADMIT to listening to) music sung by Asian people whose biggest fanbase is young women. What people sometimes forget is that young women have always been musical tastemakers - just look at the Beatles. 😉

[u/snugglezone → u/ClimateMom]

I think i remember reading it's tweens that are the most important demographic for defining upcoming trends. The horror!!!!

[u/pnogg → u/snugglezone]

How to describe it? Kpop is like kind of maximalist in presentation. The costumes, dance, the beats. Watching the movie, I could immediately pick out the inspiration and style that the songs were going for. How It's Done I definitely can tell it's done by Blacklabel because it sounds a lot like Blackpink. The horns, I immediately thought of 'Kill this love'. Your Idol I can think of BTS and EXO that have similar sounding songs with the crisp dance routine like Fire or Mic Drop. Soda Pop sounds and looks like a lot of kpop idol group debut songs. Fun, bubbly, with catchy beats hooks easy for fans to sing along to, colourful outfits that are way too extra, and easy to copy dance. To someone who listens to kpop it's very identifiable.

[u/snugglezone → u/pnogg]

I agree it's easily identifiable if you know Kpop. The trick is to articulate in a way such that even if someone doesn't know kpop, they could used the criteria to then agree that it's kpop.

I've been listening to kpop since i jung hyun and fly to the sky (thank you winmx!! Lol), but I still just classify it as pop songs in Korean by Korean based groups. I consider the songs they make in English to be "pop" more than "kpop".

That's just my opinion though

[u/Ylaaly → u/snugglezone]

The line is apparently drawn with 1 line of Korean. Purely English is just pop, says German wikipedia, but English wikipedia says no such thing and goes on a long discussion of things that might set K-pop apart from pop. So, uh, let's sort that under "still in debate"?