Criterion is putting KPop Demon Hunters on a shelf next to Roma, The Irishman and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. That’s the company Huntrix keeps now.
In August 2026, Criterion announced a 4K Blu-ray special edition of the movie, plus a two-disc Blu-ray and a two-disc DVD, all landing November 3, 2026. The announcement came with a look at the art inside the three-disc special Blu-ray edition and a rundown of the special features packed into it.
Why a physical release actually means something here
Netflix originals don’t get this treatment often. The ones that do earned it: Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, del Toro’s Pinocchio. Adding an animated musical about a K-pop girl group who fight demons to that list says a lot about where this thing landed.
It’s proof of the movie’s success, impact and legacy, and it extends a run that hasn’t slowed down since the summer of 2025.
The setup, if you somehow missed it
Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans directed. The story follows Huntrix, a K-pop girl group made up of Rumi, Mira and Zoey. They’re enormous music stars and they’re also the latest generation of demon hunters, tasked with keeping demons out of the human world.
Their weapon is their singing. The voices generate a barrier called the Honmoon. Then the Saja Boys show up, a boy band that happens to be demons in disguise, and the job gets considerably harder.
Netflix’s biggest animation hit, by a distance
The movie broke records for the platform, collected awards including the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and spawned enough merch to keep fans busy for years. Netflix has leaned hard on original content to stay on top of a crowded streaming field, and a handful of its originals now sit among the best movies ever made. A couple of those are animated.
KPop Demon Hunters is the one that broke through hardest.
It kept going back to theaters
The movie hit Netflix on June 20, 2025, with a limited theatrical release running June 20 through 26 in select cinemas. That first run was a California and New York exclusive.
Once Netflix saw the numbers, the movie went back out to select theaters in a sing-along version, this time across different countries. Another brief sing-along run followed from October 31 to November 2. Then one more in June 2026 to mark the movie’s first anniversary.
Four theatrical runs for a streaming original. That alone separates it from the rest of the Netflix catalog. The Criterion release is the part that seals it.
The sequel is going to take a while
A follow-up is happening. It might not arrive until 2029 or later. In late 2025 it was teased that KPop Demon Hunters 2 would land in 2029, and months after that, Sony Pictures Animation president Kristine Belson said it might not be finished by then.
Frustrating, sure. Also understandable. Animated musicals carry an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work, and one operating at this scale carries more.
What the second movie has to pull off
Plot details are unknown right now. Ejae, the singing voice for Rumi, has said she’d be interested in the sequel shifting musical genres toward trot and heavy metal.
What’s certain is that the sequel has to go bigger: bigger story, bigger roles and purpose for the characters, deeper lore for this universe. And a few more songs that lodge themselves in your skull.
Given how the first one performed, the sequel could get a wider theatrical run right out of the gate. And if it lands the way the original did, it could earn its own home media release, which would make Huntrix one of the few franchises with a physical shelf presence built entirely out of a streaming debut.
