The musical adventure has become the streamer’s biggest animated original and its songs dominate the chartsSchool is out, young audiences are available, and yet still, Hollywood animation is having a bad summer at the box office. In contrast to last year, when Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 occupied two of the season’s top three (and combined for about $2.7bn worldwide), it seems entirely possible that not a single fully animated movie will crack the top 10. Adding insult to injury: the Disney-Pixar original Elio has been trounced by “live-action” remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, which faithfully reproduce old cartoons with bland new actors and CG visual effects. With younger audiences steered toward those movies and seemingly also welcomed into big-tent hits like Superman and Jurassic World: Rebirth, it’s all the more remarkable that Netflix has somehow managed to have its biggest animated movie ever. KPop Demon Hunters, about a trio of women who form a pop group while moonlighting as, yes, demon hunters, was released in June – on the same weekend as Elio, no less – and has become a soundtrack-selling, replay-friendly phenom. Netflix numbers can be opaque, but there’s confirmation in Golden, a centerpiece song from the movie, hitting #2 on the Billboard charts. When was the last time a Disney movie made a play for song of the summer?Animation seems like a safe bet for budget-conscious streaming content. After all, the much-lamented cost of a movie ticket is tripled or quadrupled when bringing a family (and then maybe tripled again if they want snacks). On a per-person basis, streaming a new cartoon is the more affordable option. But even after poaching film-makers from major animation studios, the streamers have struggled with original material; Netflix’s The Sea Beast isn’t anywhere near as good as Moana, with which it shares a co-director, and its Over the Moon (the directorial debut o
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