K-Pop Demon Hunters, BTS, and How Korea Conquered American Culture
From left: Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang and Michelle Wong on Oscar night
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Growing up in Toronto, Maggie Kang felt she needed to conceal her obsession with H.O.T., the mid-1990s idol group whose tightly synchronized choreography, chantable hooks and lurid crimson hair — sometimes topped with ski goggles — helped define the template for modern K-pop.
“I had to hide that I liked K-pop,” says Kang, co-writer and co-director of KPop Demon Hunters. “Even my Asian friends thought it was lame. But it was just part of me — it wasn’t escapism, it was identity.”
These days, Kang no longer is hiding. On March 15, her hyperkinetic animated Netflix hit — in which a K-pop girl group, Huntrix, juggles global superstardom while slaying soul-eating demons disguised as a rival boy band — made history by winning best animated feature at the Academy Awards. Its self-affirmation anthem, “Golden,” currently being belted by 10-year-olds and their parents from Los Angeles to Osaka, became the first tune by a K-pop act ever to win best original song.
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Accepting the award, Kang tearfully apologized that it took so long “for those of you who look like me” to see themselves represented in such a film.
It wasn’t the Academy’s first encounter with K-culture — Parasite won best picture six years ago — but Sunday’s wins felt different, as if a wave that had been building for years had finally crested. Korean culture has been filling stadiums, with BTS and Blackpink drawing crowds once reserved for Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. Industry analysts put K-pop net export revenue — including album sales, touring receipts, streaming royalties — at an estimated $1.8 billion in 2025.
It has invaded the living room, as well, with Squid Game among the most watched series in Netflix history, and the dining room, too, with Korean restaurants expanding rapidly — a 10 percent growth in their numbers in just 2024 alone — amid surging demand for Korean fried chicken. It’s even reached the freezer aisle at Costco — where shoppers have repeatedly exhausted supplies of frozen kimbap — and now features prominently at beauty store counters, where an army of Gen Z consumers slather on Korean creams and serums infused with snail mucin, rice water and bee venom.
Tae Ju Kang and Minha Kim in Pachinko.
Apple TV+
All of which raises a glaring question: How did South Korea — a middle power of some 52 million people, a nation still emerging from a century of colonization, war and military dictatorship as recently as the 1980s — manage to pull it off? How did this modest peninsula nation end up with such a colossal cultural footprint in America?
The answer, it turns out, is complicated, involving almost as many moving parts as an intricately choreographed Seventeen dance number.
Korea Had a Long Game
The Korean Wave didn’t just happen. It was engineered over decades.
In the 1990s, a South Korean presidential advisory report helped shape the course of Korean industrial history: included in its pages was the note that Jurassic Park had generated revenue roughly equivalent to the export value of 1.5 million Hyundai cars. The statistic galvanized South Korea’s industrial planners. Their country had already conquered global markets with electronics and automobiles. Why not stories?
What followed was a deliberate government-backed push to build a cultural export industry. State subsidies for filmmakers and reinforced screen quotas shielded local cinema from Hollywood dominance while constructing the infrastructure for an industry capable of projecting Korean stories internationally.
Into this ecosystem stepped Miky Lee, the granddaughter of Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul and now the vice chairwoman of CJ Group, South Korea’s largest entertainment conglomerate. With a Harvard master’s degree and the poise of an old-school Hollywood star, Lee moved easily between Seoul boardrooms and Cannes red carpets, earning the nickname “The Godmother.” Others called her the chief architect of K-culture’s American ascent.
In 1994, Lee was working as director at Samsung Electronics America when a lawyer called with a proposition: Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg were looking for backers for a new studio. She brought the proposal to her