All they want for Christmas is a KPop Demon Hunters doll. But no one told Santa

“What’s happening with the KPop Demon Hunters merch for Xmas? Not much,” explains John Baulch, publisher of Toy World magazine. “Netflix is said to be talking to toy companies about signing a licence, but by the time that is done and product is designed, approved, manufactured and shipped, it is likely to be Easter 2026 at the earliest.”

Toy company Funko has pre-sold some wobbly-headed Hunters Funko Pop! dolls that will ship in January, but when Netflix offered the movie around two years ago, most toy companies weren’t interested. That’s a lot of money left on the table. Toy Story 3, for instance, took $1bn at the box office and close to $10bn in merch.

Perhaps it was the unusual premise of  KPop Demon Hunters that bemused toy companies. It’s like a KPop Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets the Spice Girls in Pitch Perfect. In short, demons roam the Earth, sucking energy from human souls to feed their king until three female hunters slay them. The hunters were also singers, whose tunes filled people with hope and created a musical soul barrier that trapped demons in hell.

Fast forward to 21st-century Seoul. KPop superstars Huntr/x have inherited the demon-slaying role and are on the verge of such spectacular global fame that their fans’ love could make the soul barrier permanent. So the demon king puts together a boy band, Saja Boys, and all hell breaks loose. Only female friendship and the power of fandom can defeat the forces of the abyss.

And the importance of fandom was critical in the film’s success, explains Lashai Ben Salmi, co-founder of Korean pop culture festival Hallyu Con. “When Netflix was doing its initial promotions, there was apprehension from KPop fans because there is a global stigma around a KPop fan archetype of a raging teenage girl who is boy crazy. The KPop fandom’s relationship with artists is very different to western fans, and the interaction between band and fans is more two-way. So the entire community found something poetic about the metaphor of fans’ energy being used as an eternal shield.”

This failed to impress Sony Pictures Animation, who first turned down the pitch from its own animator Maggie Kang (Puss in Boots/Rise of the Guardians). With KPDH now closing on 300m views, outstripping all other Netflix movies and series in all-time views, this feels like a poor life choice for any hapless exec who nixed the title.

The toy industry, however, should have known better. In the case of Frozen, for instance, Disney didn’t think the movie would be a hit and didn’t order enough Elsa dolls. Released in November 2013, the film topped $1bn at the box office in March 2014 and made $5bn in toy sales the same year. Despite the film’s release in 2013, an Elsa toy shortage over a year after the film became the highest-grossing animated film of all time is not a bug – it’s a feature.

“The toys for Christmas 2026 are first announced at the LA toy fair in September 2025,” explains Christopher Byrne, a US-based toy consultant and historian. “People will have been developing and designing the toys for up to two years before then if it’s a movie tie-in. By the time KPop was a hit in August, the toys for Christmas 2025 had already been made and were just arriving in warehouses.”

Parents just have to hope the fad has died away by November …  or that Santa has somehow got their backs.

Photograph courtesy Netflix