When I watched KPop Demon Hunters ahead of its premiere on the 2025 movie schedule, I immediately knew I was in for a wonderful ride when I saw that Sony was behind it. Based on stills, I was already in love with the Netflix movie’s animation style, but knowing it came from the same studio as the Spider-verse films upped my enthusiasm even more. So, when I interviewed the directors, I asked how the Marvel movie influenced and inspired them.
In return, they told me you can see that influence in the fact that their movie on Netflix’s 2025 schedule looks absolutely nothing like the beloved Spider-Man movies.
During my interview with KPop Demon Hunters’ directors, Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, I asked if their new streaming movie was influenced by other beloved Sony projects, like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse and The Mitchells vs. The Machines. In response, Appelhans told me that like those two movies, their primary goal was to do “something new:”
What they both did so well was something new. And so part of it was we did some early exploration with flash frames and graphic elements. And we're like, ‘I don't know, this looks like Spider-verse, and it's not our movie.’...In a way, they raised the bar, which is ‘Bring something fresh and new to the animation sphere.’
Spider-verse movies take clear influence from comic books, and they mix various animation styles seamlessly. KPop Demon Hunters, a movie about a KPop group who fight off demons, does that too, as Appelhans and Kang explained, by using subtle anime influences, K dramas, editorial photography and high-level music videos as its points of inspiration and reference.
While it looks nothing like Spider-verse, that’s what makes it like it, because they managed to create something “we haven’t seen” in animation, as Chris Appelhans told me.
He also brought up the personal points of inspiration. Noting that K dramas do a good job of showing how “silly and flawed and weird” characters can be, his co-director’s own point of view played into that too. He explained that Kang “had a point of view” about the three leading women of their movie that added to their unique style.
So, through all those influences, they were able to craft a look that is totally unique to their own story, like Spider-verse did a few years ago. It also helped that their shared studio, Sony, was all for this unique vision, as Appelhans said:
We were like, ‘This is it. How do we make it special? How do we make it visually striking?’ And the nice thing was, Sony, has such a deep, talented group of animators and lighters and everything-ers that when we brought those influences to them, they're like, ‘Cool, dude. We love this stuff too.’ How exciting we get to do this kind of thing.
Piggybacking off that point, Maggie Kang told me that Sony never wants to do the same thing twice, which you can see through the aforementioned films. That made it even easier for them to execute their vision and create something new and innovative, like Spider-verse and The Mitchells vs. The Machines did:
They also don’t want to do the same thing twice. So they were already on the mind of, like, ‘We want to be innovative and show something different.’ So that was really great.
As the stellar reviews for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse and Across the Spider-verse prove, this innovative and wickedly unique style they’ve developed is something audiences love. I can safely say that kind of creativity is also one of the reasons why KPop Demon Hunters works so well.
Now, if you are looking to see how all of this is “done, done, done,” you can buy or rent the Spider-verse movies and stream The Mitchells vs. The Machines and KPop Demon Hunters with a Netflix subscription.
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