A Wildly Popular Movie Meets the Film World’s Most Revered Label
· The Atlantic
Over the past year, KPop Demon Hunters seems to have completely overtaken culture. Since premiering on Netflix in June 2025, the animated film has been watched nearly 650 million times and, according to Nielsen, accounted for some 20.5 billion viewing minutes last year. The soundtrack topped Billboard charts that fall; Spirit Halloween instantly sold out of licensed costumes.
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But even the most ardent fans likely did not anticipate the mega-hit’s next big merch drop: a disc release from the Criterion Collection, home to some of cinema’s most distinguished titles. By some metrics, KPop Demon Hunters may be the most popular movie ever to be added to the collection. (Other new entries include David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and a Ukrainian folk romance from 1965.) It’s almost certainly the first Criterion inclusion to have its own flavor of McFlurry.
KPop Demon Hunters is an unlikely candidate for what’s come to be called “the Criterion treatment”: a painstaking transfer to disc, along with a making-of documentary and other special features, and a number printed on the box’s spine. Film buffs see this process as akin to an anointing; the trademark C, tucked into the upper-left corner of a plastic clamshell, signals a movie’s importance. Introducing a new title to the library can be fraught: James Kendrick, a professor of film and digital media at Baylor University, told me, “They’re always sort of risking diluting the power of that sign.”
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Online, some of the label’s longtime devotees greeted the addition of KPop Demon Hunters with an eye roll, calling the move “substantially off-brand,” and a “cash grab.” The movie is so familiar to the general public that its release seems to go against the grain of Criterion’s reputation, which was built on bringing landmark works of film history to the masses. The company adds some 30 to 60 movies to its catalog annually, most of them lost gems of world cinema, festival-circuit darlings, or old Hollywood hits. In past decades, only one or two very new releases might have made the cut; canonization is usually a retrospective project of sifting through the past to see what art stands the test of time. Now the process seems to be speeding up: This year’s roster includes six movies from 2025 so far, many of them distributed by streaming companies.
Criterion has good reason to widen the net: Netflix, Apple, and Amazon make and distribute a significant share of films these days. A title that seems ubiquitous today could vanish tomorrow, evaporating from viewing platforms or even from personal digital libraries without warning. “We’ve lived kind of free and easy for the last couple decades, assuming these corporations would do that work for us,” Amanda D. Lotz, a media scholar at Queensland University of Technology, told me, “and that’s not in their remit, necessarily.”
Streaming services, unlike their traditional studio competitors, rarely produce physical media. “I suspect it is unclear that there is a market” for companion discs, Lotz said, despite the fact that, in her estimation, they could be a “nice little business niche.” (Signs are mixed: One by one, electronics companies have stopped manufacturing disc players, but the decline in disc sales seems to have slowed.) With more new films seeming transient—especially those whose rights belong to streaming studios—it makes sense for a label like Criterion to invest more in preserving them.
The decision to pick up KPop Demon Hunters also seems less surprising when you consider Criterion’s very early history. Back when the label was putting out movies on LaserDisc, in the 1980s, it was more inclined to pick up very new and popular titles, such as Ghostbusters. Some of that popcorn sensibility lived on in the brand’s DVD era, when it released Armageddon and The Rock, by Michael Bay.
Part of co-founder Bob Stein’s vision for the label was for it to distribute some titles that already had mass public appeal; Criterion, by offering a feature-packed disc to explore, could then deepen people’s relationship to those works and to the art form writ large. The brand has long been characterized by a high-low eclecticism: The literature scholars Mark and Deborah Parker told me that when they were working on their book about the history of the DVD, they visited Criterion’s office. Peter Becker, the president of Criterion, pressed a copy of a Japanese gangster flick into their hands; just down the hall, Mark told me, “they were doing the transfer of In the Mood for Love.”
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The reasoning behind Criterion’s selections remains somewhat mysterious. (The company declined to be interviewed for this story.) Addressing an industry gathering in 2019, Becker said, “We let the movies carry the brand into the market place, so we don’t talk about the company very much.” But he did offer this explanation of what makes a work fit for Criterion: “It should be something we want to talk about, it should be a rich point of entry, but we try not to be snobby about what kinds of films can actually be exemplary.”
So what might KPop Demon Hunters exemplify? Its public reception has had a unique arc: a family-friendly fantasy that premiered on Netflix with little fanfare before becoming a word-of-mouth hit, then a critical darling, and finally an awards winner. As for its artistic properties, John Adkins, the lead writer for the newsletter Animation Obsessive, suggested to me that the film is “very tied to anime aesthetics and the slick, bright, Spider-Verse-type visuals that Sony Pictures Animation popularized” and that it could be taken to represent a modern-audience preference for an animation style with “a graphic or illustrative edge.” Tom Sito, a retired Disney animator and a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, told me that the budding animators in his classes have adopted the movie the way he and his peers once did Yellow Submarine, the surrealist cartoon set to music by the Beatles.
That fervor might be enough reason to declare KPop Demon Hunters a contemporary classic and worthy of Criterion status. The revenue that it might bring in, which could then potentially fund more esoteric selections, is another. (Criterion, savvily, is releasing its edition just in time for holiday shopping, positioning it as an arty stocking stuffer.) Adding the film to the collection could be seen as part of a broader strategy to increase the company’s visibility, including through its “Criterion Closet” social video series, its mobile van, and a new brick-and-mortar storefront in Toronto.
For many young fans of KPop Demon Hunters, who are more likely to pull up the “Golden” video on YouTube than pop a disc into a player, a souped-up Blu-ray might function mostly as a collectible—not so different from a Derpy Tiger plush or a Rumi singing doll. Some, though, may grow attached to the idea of physical media, or could even come to see home video as a vital technology rather than a nostalgia object. Cinema is a relatively young art form; the idea of owning a personal copy of a film is an even more recent invention. KPop Demon Hunter’s latest accolade is a reminder that the canon, too, remains far from fixed.