KPop Demon Hunters from the Lens of Transnational Proximity
Dal Yong Jin / Simon Fraser University
KPop Demon Hunters was one of the most famous animated films of 2025, becoming Netflix’s most-watched film of all time within two months of its release. “Golden,” a song by K-pop female group HUNTR/X from the film, also became a record-breaking hit, achieving global success, including multiple weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Global Charts and Hot 100. Due to these successes, global audiences and cultural experts expected the film and song to win numerous awards at the 2026 Golden Globe Awards and the Academy Awards. While we do not yet have the Academy’s outcomes, as expected, KPOP Demon Hunters won a Global Globe for best animated feature, while “Golden” was named best original song.
Various elements contribute to the success of the film and song, including high-quality production, dazzling visual images, humor, hybridity, and well-structured plots (Jin, 2025). One of the most significant dimensions of the film is that its stories resonated with global audiences, whether they are teens, twenties, or thirties. When Maggie Kang, a co-director of the film, delivered her acceptance speech, she emphasized the importance of stories, saying that “a movie so deeply rooted in Korean culture could resonate with a global audience.” KPop Demon Hunters is not the first, nor the only, cultural work to use local stories to help global audiences feel that they share common values. Several previous cultural products, such as Kingdom (2019), Squid Game (2021-2025), The Glory (2022), and All of Us Are Dead (2022), developed stories rooted in Korean culture yet universal in appeal, which was a primary factor in their success. Likewise, the global popularity of many K-pop songs before “Golden,” particularly those by BTS, drew on universal values expressed through their lyrics and music videos.
In the global cultural sphere, the flow of popular culture has been analyzed through a few theoretical frameworks, including cultural imperialism, cultural proximity, cultural discount, and affective affinity. Among these, cultural proximity, advanced primarily by Joseph Straubhaar (1991), has been widely used to explain why regional audiences tend to prefer local popular culture to American popular culture. As the alternative approach to cultural imperialism theory, it argues that audiences in Latin America prefer telenovelas produced in Mexico and Brazil to American dramas because of linguistic and cultural proximity. When Korean popular culture, such as dramas, films, and K-pop, has been successful, some scholars have used cultural proximity as a crucial theoretical framework to explain its spread in other countries, not only within East Asia but also in the Middle East, Africa, and North America (Kim and Wang, 2012). However, these observations and analyses are not valid anymore as the Korean Wave has been globally popular, as can be seen in KPop Demon Hunters and the Squid Game series, although these regions do not share linguistic and cultural similarities with Korea.
Under these circumstances, numerous scholars have introduced and developed the notion of transnational proximity to discuss the global spread of Korean popular culture across diverse linguistic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. Transnational proximity elucidates the enduring appeal of Hallyu worldwide. Many global audiences enjoy Korean culture for its highly relatable, sympathetic messages that address universal issues, such as class divides, people’s struggles, and uncertainty (Jin, 2022; Ju, 2023; Kim, 2023). From television dramas to films to K-pop, global audiences enjoy Korean popular culture that conveys universal values, not only addressing these problems but also offering remedies and hope that people can share. They easily find universal elements of stories and storytelling in the plot, characters, and narrative point of view in Korean cultural content, helping them enjoy such locally produced items, which are also accompanied by top-quality performances (Jin, 2023).
KPop Demon Hunters centers on a girl band HUNTR/X that uses music to save the world from evil forces. Co-director, Chris Appelhans, who also received the best animated feature award, called the movie “a love letter to music, to the power it has to connect us, to make us see some kind of shared humanity” (Ng, 2026). Global fans have spoken of how the film’s empowering themes of self-acceptance, community, and fighting against inner ‘demons’ resonated with them (Ng, 2026). As both directors emphasize, transnational proximity has become one of the most crucial elements for the spread of the film and other Korean cultural products in the global cultural sphere. In the early 21st century, global audiences live in uncertain times, as exemplified by COVID-19 and global tariff issues, and therefore experience significant anxiety about their current and future lives. The popularity of the Squid Game series and KPop Demon Hunters suggests these cultural programs, which originated in Korea, resonated with global audiences’ feelings, which are part of transnational proximities. Several Korean cultural products have achieved global popularity by combining unique elements embedded in Korean culture with universal qualities.
What is significant is that local popular culture that emphasizes transnational proximity continues to maintain distinct local characteristics. As a cultural practice, transnational proximity is important because it highlights local identity, which is itself increasingly becoming part of global values in cultural production.
As Maggie Kang noted, the most successful Korean cultural products foreground Koreanness, while incorporating universal themes that resonate with global audiences, particularly young audiences, who can identify with them in a 21st-century capitalist society. In this regard, globally popular Korean culture relies on both local authenticity and global familiarity, as cultural content representing Koreanness appeals to audiences worldwide who experience similar sociocultural environments (Jin, 2023, 21-22).
Overall, transnational proximity advances local popular culture. Korean cultural creators produce content that conveys transnational proximity while advancing local specificity in storytelling and performance. In the globalized cultural landscape, many local cultural creators adopt Hollywood-style genres or Netflix-driven themes to appeal to global audiences; however, cultural content that emphasizes local uniqueness while developing universal values has proven to be the most successful. KPop Demon Hunters, alongside other Korean cultural products, exemplify this trend by advancing a distinctive form of transnational proximity and underscoring the importance of appropriating local cultural specificity in ways that resonate with global cultural values.
Image Credits:
- Maggie Kang won the 2026 Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Animated
- Rei Ami, Audrey Nuna, and Ejae at the 83rd Golden Globes
- Lee Jung-jae in Squid Game
Ng, K. (2026). KPop Demon Hunters wins Golden Globes for best animated film. BBC. 13 January. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8pnn9p8lgo
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