Highlights
- KPop Demon Hunters set a new Netflix record with 482M views in the second half of 2025.
- The animated film outpaced major titles like Frankenstein, Stranger Things, and Wednesday.
- The success of KPop Demon Hunters underscores Netflix’s growing reliance on animated content to drive global engagement.
KPop Demon Hunters has once again dominated Netflix’s viewing charts, setting a new record for the most-watched title in the second half of 2025, according to the company’s latest What We Watched biannual engagement report. Published on Jan 21, 2026, it noted that the animated feature drew an estimated 482M views from July to December 2025, surpassing every other film and series on the platform during that period.
Along with the original movie, the KPop Demon Hunters Lyric Videos also generated 32M views.
Released on June 20, 2025, the animated feature KPop Demon Hunters has steadily grown its footprint since premiere, previously crossing 500M total views by late December, and becoming the third most-watched English-language movie on the platform.
Netflix calculates “views” by dividing total hours watched by a title’s runtime, a metric the company says reflects engaged viewing across its global footprint. The report showed that total platform consumption reached 96B hours watched during the second half of 2025. Despite, KPop Demon Hunters' 482M views, non-English titles accounted for more than “a third of all viewing,” on the platform.
KPop Demon Hunters in Comparison With Other Top Titles
Netflix’s report places KPop Demon Hunters well ahead of its nearest film competitors in the second half of 2025. According to the What We Watched breakdown, the next most-watched films, including Happy Gilmore 2 (135M views) and Oscar-contender Frankenstein (98M views), generated a fraction of the engagement observed in the case of KPop Demon Hunters.
On the television side, established franchises performed strongly, but none matched the film’s cumulative numbers. Wednesday season 2 led series viewership with roughly 124M views, and Stranger Things season 5 drew about 94M views during the same window. All five seasons of Netflix’s marquee franchise Stranger Things brought in roughly 275M views, illustrating how a single animated title outpaced long-running Western English series.
Netflix’s latest engagement report solidifies KPop Demon Hunters not merely as a strong performer, but as a defining global title of 2025. Its standout viewership record reflects broader shifts in global viewing tastes where culturally specific animated content, often amplified by music, genre blending, rival or exceed traditional media models. Time Magazine previously positioned the movie as 2025's “Breakthrough of the Year," due to its immense cultural and commercial influence.
