Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation’s “KPop Demon Hunters” dominated the cultural landscape in 2025 like few films, animated or otherwise, are capable of these days. The movie about demon-hunting warriors who moonlight as KPop superstars became the most watched film on Netflix ever, with 325 million views.
The music was also a blockbuster, becoming the first film soundtrack on the Billboard Hot 100 to have four of its songs in the Top 10. It was recently nominated for five Grammy Awards, including Song of the Year for “Golden.” And if there is one moment that perfectly sums up the galvanizing euphoria of “KPop Demon Hunters,” it’s the climactic sequence centered on the anthemic “What It Sounds Like.”
“It was the thing that we were working toward emotionally,” director Maggie Kang said. “At some point, we realized our entire story culminates with this one song. There’s so much pressure on this one song to pull it all off and it was daunting.”
During the script phase, director Chris Appelhans said that they had a similar structure to the climax with “placeholder lyrics that had to do with the broader statements of, What if the pain that we’ve been through can make us stronger?” Appelhans said. “What if our scars can make us more interesting and not weaker?”
While they were finishing, he added, the two writer-directors texted each other about how much they believed that this was the right ending. “From year one, you had this pretty loose vision of how all of these trains could arrive in the station at the same time, and then four years later, we were in the middle of actually trying to make that happen,” he said.
The sequence had to accomplish so much, emotionally and plot-wise, as ostracized lead singer Rumi reunites with her Huntr/x bandmates to battle the Saja Boys, a boy band led by Jinu and sent by demon king Gwi-Ma to help him take over the world.
“The first verse of the song is (Rumi’s) statement of how she plans to live and survive,”Appelhans said. “It’s the reunification of the girls’ relationship. It’s essentially a scene in which they have to accept each other and apologize, and then it becomes a showdown between that worldview and Gwi-Ma’s worldview. And then it becomes the moment for Jinu to sacrifice himself. And then it becomes the physical victory. And at the same time, it needed to believably be like a Super Bowl halftime show with choreography and movement that didn’t feel overly planned, but also felt theatrical and cool, and that stopped and started musically in order for events to unfold.”
Those pauses lasted as long as a minute and a half, which Appelhans said is a long time to let a dramatic scene play out “without totally breaking the sense of musical coherence.” But as the scene evolved, the pieces fell into place. “I watched the movie when we were done and was like, ‘Oh s—, this is pretty clever,’” Kang said. “The lyrics are, ‘This is what it sounds like.’ That wasn’t from us; that came from Jenna (Andrews) and Stephen (Kirk), who wrote the song.”
The songwriters suggested several iterations for the lyrics to the climactic song, but the filmmakers immediately seized on the phrase This is what it sounds like when it was proposed. “All the music in our movie has dual meaning,” said Kang, who described “This Is What It Sounds Like” as a song where “the characters are vulnerable and singing and being honest. I think that’s what makes it so satisfying. And then that moment where they hug and we get that burst of light, it’s so emotional.”
Sony Pictures Imageworks contributed to the moment too. By that point, Appelhans added, they had worked so long and hard on the emotional structure and the song itself “that when it came time to decorate the cakes, so to speak, with the visual elements, the song and the scene started to tell us what it needed.”
And that included one particular breakthrough: “We’re looking at the shots and we’re like, ‘We just need f—ing glitter to start falling from the sky for no reason, because some catharsis has been unleashed.’ That’s what’s so beautiful about doing music videos and concerts. It’s not a rational decision. It’s like, ‘What do I want to see based on the way this music makes me feel?’ It’s a very visceral response.”
Appelhans pointed to the visual storytelling in Sony Pictures Imageworks contributed to the the sequence, with the characters’ outlook shifting. Instead of wanting to build a perfect, golden barrier to keep demons out of their world (the “Honmoon”), an “overly simplistic goal,” the heroines accepted a more nuanced, realistic objective.
“We realized that the whole point of what the girls are doing is growing beyond that very simple philosophy of what will make the world a better place, and finding their own philosophy, which is ‘We’re going to build something stronger by including some of our flaws,’” he said. This is where the rainbow version of the Honmoon came from, as well as the patterns on Rumi’s face that identified her as part demon.
After the movie came out, it was gratifying for the filmmakers to watch fans on social media break down the symbolism that they had baked into the movie but not explicitly spelled out. “We’re like, ‘Oh my God, it all translated, what a relief,’” Appelhans said. “But I think part of the promise of this movie was that the spectacle and the fantasticness of demon-fighting pop stars could give you permission (to look for deeper meanings).” And while the final song was inspired by Lorde’s 2017 song “Green Light,” he likened the movie’s experience to the spectacle of another pop star, David Bowie, where “the fantasy and the glam become part of the character’s story.”
This story first ran in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
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