It’s been 25 years since Josie and the Pussycats — one of the best comic book movies ever made — crashed and burned at the box office. The movie has since become a cult classic, although for a lot of people it’s still remembered primarily for its failure.
That said, Josie is a movie in which you can see the building blocks of a lot of successful blockbusters to follow. The over-the-top aesthetics and anticapitalist vibe of Barbie owes a little bit to Josie and the Pussycats, and it’s not a stretch to argue that if you like KPop Demon Hunters, one of 2025’s biggest cultural events, you should love Josie, too.
Josie and the Pussycats, released in April 2001, centers on the titular band, based on characters from Archie Comics, as they navigate friendship, the unforgiving turn-of-the-millennium music industry, and a hidden plot against the teenagers of America. The pop-punk trio’s music career and world-saving adventure cross paths in the third act, shortly after our point-of-view character is isolated from the rest of the band, putting a strain on their friendship and threatening to break the Pussycats up forever.
With that plot summary in mind, you can probably understand why so many people recommended KPop Demon Hunters to fans of Josie and the Pussycats (and vice versa). The power of friendship, the trials of the music industry, and a conspiracy that has to be tackled at the “big concert” at the end are all a key part of both movies’ plots. Also, both have a romantic subplot for our main character which is charming but largely ornamental!
To be clear, we aren’t saying that KPop Demon Hunters owes its success to — or is a ripoff of — Josie and the Pussycats. But it likely benefits from a culture that has evolved past making fun of any movie that deals with girls and pop music, and has accepted that Josie and the Pussycats is a wildly underrated gem that was ahead of its time.
As with KPop Demon Hunters, the color palette in Josie and the Pussycats is unapologetically bright, creating the feeling that the movie exists in a heightened, almost animated version of reality. While Demon Hunters is literally an animated movie with supernatural elements, Josie wades in those same waters with a level of product placement that’s so over-the-top it feels like it belongs in the world of Wall-E, and a government — and corporate — controlled plot to brainwash people.
In both movies, the key piece of the puzzle lies in the band’s friendship. In Josie and the Pussycats, they literally have a recurring line that says “friends first, a band second.” That raises the stakes when Josie (Rachel Leigh Cook) herself is briefly brainwashed and ends up at odds with Melody (Tara Reid) and Valerie (Rosario Dawson) near the end of the movie’s second act.
Similarly, Rumi’s (Arden Cho) alienation from Huntr/x raises the stakes in KPop Demon Hunters. While Josie’s struggle with the band is largely something forced upon her by the evil record company (who both brainwashed her and also elevated her to the role of the band’s “leader” before that), Rumi’s is partially self-inflicted, since her demonic side is something she worked hard to hide from those she loved until they found out on their own. In both cases, though, the “infection” that makes them appear briefly villainous is out of their control.
And, of course, in both cases, it’s their love for their friends and the relationship of the band that brings them back together in the end.
The biggest diversion between the two focuses on the boy bands. While the Saja Boys are villains of KPop Demon Hunters, DuJour — the corollary boy band in Josie — is much more innocent. At the start of the movie, Wyatt (Alan Cumming) tries to murder them, and they arrive at the end of the movie to help Josie and company, with one member of the band in particular (Alex Martin’s Les) having been supporting them quietly from the background all along.
Les could be compared to Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop), who sacrifices himself in KPop Demon Hunters, firmly establishing him as a hero in the end. But again, it isn’t a 1:1 comparison, since all four members of DuJour worked against Wyatt and Megarecords, while the Saja Boys were mostly unmoved.
DuJour are so beloved, in fact, that not only did Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, the writer/directors of Josie, tease a reunion of sorts, but Seth Green also teased the possibility as recently as this past August.
In short, Josie and the Pussycats is the kind of movie that had no real chance of making money when it came out. But changing cultural attitudes — in part due to the way we have embraced Clueless, Josie, and other movies with a similar vibe — have set the stage for the likes of Barbie and KPop Demon Hunters. If you like one, you should totally check out the other. After all, we have it on good faith that Agent Kelly thinks Huntr/x is totally jerkin’!
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