The Directors of ‘Elio’ and ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Talk About the Reality of Selling Diverse Movies

In a recent Hollywood Reporter animation roundtable, KPop Demon Hunters filmmaker Maggie Kang and Elio co-director Domee Shi (Turning Red) discussed pushing for representation in a time when studios seem to be playing it safe with sequels. It’s a triumph when an original story like KPop Demon Hunters hits big. But original stories can also be mishandled behind the scenes, contributing to less-than-robust box office returns, as was seemingly the case with Elio.

Shi was brutally honest in talking about the Elio rollout. “From my experience making movies, making animated films is hard and a financial risk regardless of if they’re originals or sequels. Just because something is a sequel doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to be successful,” she said, with the added context of having come off the surprise pandemic-era hit of Turning Red.

“I feel like at least at Pixar, we’re always trying to figure out how to continue telling unique and original stories that everyone could relate to and love. But it’s been tough… Elio was released this summer and got massacred at the box office, to put it bluntly.”

Shi continued to posit that Pixar is noticing, despite the numbers, that the characters have gotten a lot of appreciation in the animation fan community. “But the people who have seen it love it. And it’s just a big challenge,” she said. “How do you push original theatrical kinds of films through all of the noise, through all of the media and content that’s being released?”

Shi also gave Kang her flowers for the success of KPop Demon Hunters, describing it as “such a beacon of hope and light for original films,” and added, “I hope with the success of films like KPop that big studios will be wanting to take more creative risks.”

Kang shone light on what was hardly an overnight sensation, despite KPop Demon Hunters seeming like one upon release on Netflix. She said of the years-long journey to get it made at Sony Animation, “We [you] first start pitching a movie, you immediately talk to marketing. So marketing is involved and has a very big say on what kind of films get made at a certain studio. I truly believe that the K-pop of it all [in] our film got it greenlit.”

With K-pop leading the way, original creativity followed. “I was just like, ‘I’m gonna take this K-pop idea and make it the most Korean personal movie that I can make as a Korean creator,’ just to see Korean representation on screen,” she said. “As a Korean person and seeing and hearing from other Koreans as well—we’ve never had that representation, like of our culture of [these] women just in different garb, like traditional Korean garb. [We’ve] just never seen that before, and my parents, the first time they saw it, were crying.”

Kang is realistic, however, about what is viewed as the formula for success. “I’m an animation kid that grew up in the big studio machine. I spent most of my career at DreamWorks, and we’re always thinking about ‘what can we sell?’. Animation can be at the big studio level; they’re very expensive to make, so you want less risk,” she said. “What are the ideas that are going to get the most eyes on this product? On this film?’ And so I think that’s just kind of how I’m thinking all the time. I’m always thinking about ways to link the marketability of an idea with something very personal and then making and finding a story within that—with a character’s journey that is very universal and relatable to anybody.”

Watch the rest of the animation roundtable below:

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