The K-Pop Demon Hunters’ tourism wave is just getting started

Sites in Seoul featured in the movie have emerged as must-visit destinations. Read more at straitstimes.com.

SEOUL – Honolulu-based Christine Kim was early on the K-Pop Demon Hunters travel trend. In fairness, her trip to Seoul with her husband and kids was already on the books before the Netflix film came out in June 2025. The plan, initially at least, was to visit grandparents.

But then Rumi, Zoey and Mira, the movie’s protagonists, became her 5-year-old daughter’s idols, and the itinerary got rewritten in real time. When they visited a jimjilbang, or Korean spa, and the Namsan Tower, the setting for the rival Saja Boys’s final show in the movie, the Kims’ family trip turned into the ultimate bragging rights. 

“My daughter seemed to be totally shocked that the places from the movie were real,” Ms Kim says via text. “She was so excited, she was speechless.” 

It wasn’t just her daughter who bought into the cultural moment. “I bought my son a black hanbok and gat [traditional clothing and hat] so he could be a Saja Boy for Halloween,” Kim recalls. “And when we went to the Nike Store at Myeongdong, my daughter made a T-shirt with a magpie bird on it because of the K-Pop Demon Hunters character.” 

As of late 2025, K-Pop Demon Hunters remained Netflix’s most-watched original film of all time with more than 500 million views. In case you don’t have small children or somehow managed to escape the phenomenon, the animated action-musical produced by Sony Pictures Animation follows Huntrix, a K-pop girl group whose chart-topping hits help them take down demons that threaten humanity.  

If it was the critical and commercial hit that nobody saw coming, as Korean-Canadian animator Maggie Kang recently told Bloomberg in a lengthy interview, it’s also now becoming the travel catalyst that nobody saw coming.