April 2, 2026
SEOUL – “Jinu is alive in our hearts,” director Chris Appelhans said, drawing laughter from a packed room at CGV Yongsan in central Seoul on Wednesday. “Beyond that, I can’t say.”
That was about as much as anyone could get out of the “KPop Demon Hunters” directors about the sequel, which Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation announced earlier last month.
Appelhans had been asked whether Jinu — a fan-favorite who sacrifices himself in the film’s climax — might return. Co-director Maggie Kang, for her part, was no less tight-lipped.
“We have the big idea locked in,” she said. “But that’s all I can give you.” She promised it would be “bigger and more eventful” than the first film, without elaborating.
The press conference brought together directors Kang and Appelhans, singer-songwriter Ejae, and producers Lee Yu-han, Kwak Joong-kyu and Nam Hee-dong of The Black Label — less than a month after the film swept the 98th Academy Awards with wins for best animated feature and best original song.
Since its Netflix debut last June, the film has topped 500 million views on the platform and landed eight songs on the Billboard Hot 100. Its theme, “Golden,” became the first K-pop song to win both a Grammy and an Oscar.
It was Appelhans’ first visit to Korea since the film came out. He’s been to the country plenty of times — his wife is Korean — but the trip carried a different weight now, with a double Oscar win and a global phenomenon attached to his name.
The fans, Appelhans said, “found the movie and brought it to the rest of the world,” and the second film should repay that by surprising them rather than repeating what worked. The commitment to authenticity, he added, will carry through to the sequel — the stories, the mythology, all of it.
“The Koreanness is the soul of it,” Applehans said. “Being a part of my wife’s family for 20 years taught me a lot about the different ways that [Koreans] show love, the different ways they deal with pain. That was eye-opening to me, and it’s half my life now.”
He tied it back to the film’s protagonist: Rumi’s arc, he said, is about “somebody who has to suffer a lot, and coming through that makes them really strong.” To him, that resilience and sense of unity are what the film is really getting at when it comes to being Korean.
Kang and Ejae picked up on that thread from a different angle. Both grew up straddling Korean and North American cultures, and they had used their Oscar acceptance speeches to speak to the experience.
Both went on to expand on the point at the press conference. Kang addressed what she called a common misunderstanding people have about “gyopo” — ethnic Koreans raised abroad — that they don’t quite feel at home in either culture. The reality, she said, is often the opposite.
“A lot of us who are straddling both cultures, like myself and Ejae, we are the ones who will be bridging that gap,” she said. Being raised outside Korea, she added, hasn’t made them any less Korean or any less proud of it.
Ejae, who was born in Seoul but grew up in the US before returning to Korea, said she dreamed of being a singer as a kid but got made fun of for liking K-pop in America. She spent nearly a decade as a trainee at SM Entertainment before pivoting to songwriting for K-pop acts like Red Velvet and Aespa.
“I couldn’t have imagined any of this would blow up like this,” she said. She only found out after performing “Golden” at the Oscars stage that the star-studded audience — Leonardo DiCaprio, Steven Spielberg and all — had been waving lightsticks the whole time. “That’s when the tears came. I was so proud.”
The producers, for their part, took the Oscars’ most talked-about misstep in stride. The orchestra had cut one of them off mid-speech as the “Golden” team accepted Best Original Song — a moment that drew widespread anger online.
Lee said all he’d wanted to say was a quick thank-you to their families and the rest of the team. “It was meant to be short, so I was a little disappointed it got cut off,” he said. “But it was such an incredible moment that I just enjoyed every bit of it.”
The last question of the day went to Ejae, and it was blunt: with “Golden” topping the Billboard Hot 100 and going 5x platinum, what kind of royalties is she looking at?
“It takes a while to come through,” she said, laughing. “But I’m excited. I think I can finally get my mom a gift.”