KPop Demon Hunters is getting a sequel, and since it’s going to take a long time to animate, it’s going to take a long time before it eventually arrives on Netflix. For a time, the movie was projected to come out in 2029, a good four years after the original blew up last year. But now, it sounds like it might take even longer than that.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Sony Pictures Animation president Kristine Belson didn’t say much about KPop Demon Hunters 2, but did heavily imply that the planned 2029 date is probably not going to pan out. When THR said that a 2029 release seemed “far-fetched,” Belson responded by, as the outlet describes, placing “her pointer finger to her nose, to indicate that’s correct thinking.” Could we be waiting until 2030? 2031? That’s brutal.
From the sound of it, even in these very early stages the team has been so busy during awards season that directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans have had little time to buckle down on the project. KPop Demon Hunters has been doing very well at award shows, with wins at the Academy Awards and the Grammys, among many others. I guess all that flying back and forth between different events does have a way of complicating things. Larian expressed a similar sentiment when Baldur’s Gate 3 was winning a bunch of awards after it launched in 2023, which had staff out of the office and at award shows so much it got in the way of the studio’s work.
KPop Demon Hunters 2 has a lot of potential threads to follow whenever it does eventually come out. The first movie doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, per se, but there are a lot of character beats it only briefly touches on that could be expanded into a full-blown sequel.