The Criterion Collection has added KPop Demon Hunters to its catalog, and by some measures it is the most popular film the label has ever released — watched nearly 650 million times since its June 2025 Netflix premiere and, per Nielsen, responsible for roughly 20.5 billion viewing minutes last year alone. [1] It is joining a company whose September slate also includes David Lynch's Wild at Heart and a 1965 Ukrainian folk romance, and it is, by The Atlantic's own reckoning, probably the first Criterion title with its own flavor of McFlurry. [1]

Criterion's "treatment," a painstaking disc transfer, a making-of documentary, supplementary features, and the trademark spine number in the case's upper-left corner, has functioned for decades as an anointing. James Kendrick, a professor of film and digital media at Baylor University, told The Atlantic the label is "always sort of risking diluting the power of that sign" whenever it adds a new title, and this addition tests that risk more directly than most. [1] Online, some of Criterion's longtime devotees reacted to the news with exactly the language Kendrick's warning predicts: The Atlantic reports they called the move "substantially off-brand," and a "cash grab." [1]

The Atlantic's own framing treats those reactions as a minority objection inside a larger, more forgiving story about physical media's second act. Streaming companies rarely produce companion discs, and titles distributed by Netflix, Apple or Amazon can vanish from personal libraries without warning the way physical purchases cannot. [1] Media scholar Amanda D. Lotz told the magazine that studios' traditional disc-release habits are not something streamers have picked up: "We've lived kind of free and easy for the last couple decades, assuming these corporations would do that work for us, and that's not in their remit, necessarily." [1] Under that reading, Criterion isn't diluting anything: it's doing preservation work streaming companies have simply opted out of, for a title popular enough to make that preservation commercially viable.

What The Atlantic's own reporting does not fully reconcile is that both readings can be true at once, and that the fans calling it a cash grab are not wrong about the mechanism even if they are wrong about the motive. Criterion is timing the release for holiday shopping, positioning what the magazine calls "an arty stocking stuffer" that could, in company co-founder Bob Stein's original vision for the label, use a popular title's mass appeal to fund more esoteric selections down the line. [1] That is not a new idea for Criterion specifically — the label put out Ghostbusters on LaserDisc in the 1980s and released Michael Bay's Armageddon and The Rock on DVD — but it is a return to a version of the brand that had receded as Criterion's identity calcified around festival darlings and lost classics of world cinema. [1]

Criterion's own president, Peter Becker, has offered the closest thing to an official standard, telling an industry gathering in 2019 that a Criterion title "should be something we want to talk about, it should be a rich point of entry, but we try not to be snobby about what kinds of films can actually be exemplary." [1] John Adkins, lead writer for the newsletter Animation Obsessive, told The Atlantic that KPop Demon Hunters is "very tied to anime aesthetics and the slick, bright, Spider-Verse-type visuals that Sony Pictures Animation popularized," positioning it as representative of a specific, arguably canon-worthy animation style rather than simply a popularity pick. [1] Tom Sito, a retired Disney animator and USC professor emeritus, compared its hold on his students to his own generation's attachment to Yellow Submarine. [1]

The disagreement, in the end, is really about what "the Criterion treatment" is supposed to signal. For collectors who read the spine number as a verdict on artistic durability, a movie six months removed from a Spirit Halloween costume tie-in reads as a category error regardless of its Nielsen numbers. For a company now adding six 2025 releases to its 2026 slate, many of them from streaming platforms, a movie's cultural saturation is itself evidence that the culture will want to own a copy of it later, which was always at least part of the label's original, more populist mission before that mission narrowed into snob-signaling. [1] KPop Demon Hunters becoming a Criterion release does not settle which reading is correct. It just means, for the first time, both readings will sit on the same shelf.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles