Kevin Power on KPop Demon Hunters
| For anyone without children under the age of eighteen, it may have come as a surprise to learn, at Sunday’s Grammy Awards ceremony, that the “Best Song Written for Visual Media” in 2025 was something called “Golden” from a movie called KPop Demon Hunters. For everyone else, “Golden”—which has gone double platinum in the US—and Demon Hunters—now Netflix’s most-watched film of all time, having sailed past 500 million viewings earlier this year—have been inescapable. “Four or five million of these viewings occurred in my house over the last month,” Kevin Power drolly notes in the NYR Online this week. Thus, “in the last six weeks I have, through no real choice of my own, paid closer attention to KPop Demon Hunters than I have to any other artwork ever, including my own novels.” Power finds in “the movie’s magpie approach to source material” a “semiconscious allegory [for] the conditions of its own production and reception”: The true subject of mass entertainment products is now the creation of mass entertainment products and the drama of their possible fates in the marketplace. That this is the literal subject of KPop Demon Hunters only makes visible a general truth: mass entertainment products now seek to create the illusion of an unmediated connection between fans and idols, a frictionless vision of the perfected market.
Below, alongside Power’s essay, are five articles from our archives about mass entertainment products. At the center of KPop Demon Hunters is a fantasy of unmediated connection between fans and idols, a frictionless vision of the perfected market. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie finds its comedy in the inflexibility both of plastic and of modern womanhood. —August 27, 2023 More than ever, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies are about a film industry in crisis. —August 2, 2023 New Subscriber Benefit!Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles. Under Stan Lee’s guidance, Marvel marketed not only its characters but also the men who created them. —August 19, 2021 “Now that I’m taking my own kids to see the show, I can’t help noticing how much has changed. Star Wars has become, to a remarkable degree, captive to the geek revolution it spawned back at the end of the 1970s—and it is this, more than anything else, that explains why The Force Awakens feels at times like the product of a giant focus group. (It could have just as easily been called Revenge of the Fans.)” —February 25, 2016 “Looking back on the [Harry Potter] series now, certain questions occur. For one thing, it is hard to understand why so many witches and wizards would want to join the Dark Lord and become Death Eaters. Voldemort is neither beautiful nor charming, as many Dark Lords have been in the past, both in history and in literature. His aspect is repellent and his manner toward his associates cold, haughty, and cruel.” —September 27, 2007 You are receiving this message because you signed up
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