Netflix have announced a new movie called Kpop Demon Hunters and the trailer has immediately brought back a flood of League of Legends’ virtual Kpop group, K/DA.
The animated film has been developed by Sony Pictures Animation, the makers of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Mitchells vs. The Machines.
The trailer stars a K-pop girl group trio, Rumi (Arden Cho), Mira (May Hong), and Zoey (Ji-young Yoo) who have a secret second life fighting otherworldly threats and have to deal with a bunch of demons posing as a rival boy band.
Unsurprisingly, a group of K-pop singers who are also badass warriors reminded a lot of people of K/DA, the virtual K-pop group created by Riot Games, which turned in-game champions Ahri, Evelynn, Akali, Kai’Sa and Seraphine into musical superstars.
However, comparisons seem to go deeper than that with the outfits, music style, and even the fonts reminding people of the LoL band.
Everywhere you look, talk of this upcoming film mentions K/DA. The top comment on a short clip from the film posted on TikTok saying “It’s lowkey giving K/DA vibes” has over 36k likes.
Scroll down further, and you’ll find an onslaught of other commenters also mentioning League of Legends and K/DA.
These comparisons are also helped by the fact that the trailer features a new original song performed by three members of K-pop phenomenon TWICE; Jeongyeon, Jihyo, Chaeyoung.
And the latter two out of those three also lent their vocals to the K/DA song: I’ll Show You with Chaeyoung performing as Akali and Jihyo as Ahri.
The film’s co-director, Maggie Kang also revealed that she had the idea for the film seven years ago. That takes us back to 2018, which is when K/DA debuted at the 2018 League of Legends World Championship final in Incheon, South Korea.
She confirmed that it took seven years to get Kpop Demon Hunters made, from its first pitch to its eventual release and shared some original artwork she created for the film.
Some believe Riot Games missed out by not licensing an animated show or movie for Netflix to follow up on their extremely successful Arcane series, which found global popularity with an Arcane Season 2 launch event taking place in London.
But it seems nobody ever reached out to get the license, as former Head of Riot Games Music Toa ‘Iceburrg’ Dunn posted on X (formerly Twitter) expressing how he would have loved to work on the project.
Otherwise, Riot Games is still enjoying plenty of crossover with Eastern Popstars.
Especially with Fnatic’s British Valorant star Jake ‘Boaster’ Howlett’s dances garnering celebrity attention.
In my seven years of esports writing, I’ve introuduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I’m most proud of the latter.
