Victories for best animated film and best original song at Oscars 2026 signal the most meaningful acceptance of Korean pop culture by the American film industry to date.
Co-director and writer Maggie Kang and producer Michelle Wong became the first people of South Korean descent to ever win in the animated feature category. They accepted the award with co-director Chris Appelhans.
“To all the fans who got us here and for all of those who look like me, sorry that it took us so long to see us in a movie like this,” Kang said of her fellow Korean people. “This is for Korea and for Koreans everywhere.” Meanwhile, Appelhans spoke about the power of storytelling in its ability to “connect us as humans across cultures and borders.” He then encouraged “all the young filmmakers, artists, musicians in all corners of the globe,” urging them to “tell your story, sing in your voice,” Appelhans added. “I promise you the world is waiting.” And the world sure had to wait a long while for Hollywood to catch up with Korean culture—with K-Pop earning its first major wins this year both at the Oscars and Grammys, where “Golden” won best song written for visual media—the first K-Pop track ever to do so. While K-pop filled stadiums, dominated global charts, and generated fandoms organized like small armies, for years Hollywood kept the phenomenon at arm’s length, as one sometimes does with seemingly distant cultural ecosystems. Idols and the imagery associated with Korean pop culture long remained a parallel world to the great rituals of the American industry. The Oscars, with their symbolic weight, were one of those boundaries. With KPop Demon Hunters, that line has lifted. The Netflix film was already a hit before Academy Awards night. Kpop Demon Hunters is the most-watched film ever on the platform: it surpassed the record held by Red Notice, accumulating more than 480 million views in the first six months since release. The scale of the phenomenon has been obvious to anyone who has opened up social media in recent months: memes everywhere, choreography replicated on TikTok, fan art spanning from Seoul to Los Angeles. And then there is the music. “Golden,” the song at the center of the soundtrack, was the real global pop phenomenon between 2025 and early 2026. The song has earned more than a billion streams on Spotify, the top spot on the Billboard chart last August, and eight total weeks at the top of the charts until mid-October. It was also the first song by a female K-pop-related group to reach that industry milestone. For decades, the American film industry looked to Asia primarily as a source of aesthetic influences. Today, that thinking has rightfully changed: Korean pop culture was honored during Hollywood’s biggest night. Oscars 2026 will likely be remembered as the moment when KPop became impossible to ignore—not only due to “Golden,” or the animated film win—but because, for one night, Hollywood had to acknowledge that one of the most powerful forms of contemporary pop culture was born far away from the Hollywood Hills. Originally published by Vanity Fair Italy
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