Netflix Sued For Copyright Infringement Over The #1 Movie On The Service

KPop Demon Hunters was the sleeper hit of 2025, dominating Netflix’s streaming numbers. The musical-fantasy produced by Sony Pictures Animation has over 600 million views since its debut in June of last year. The movie spent 52 weeks on the streamer’s global top ten. In the United States, KPop Demon Hunters amassed 20.5 billion viewing minutes, continuing to gain traction over a year after its initial release. The film’s soundtrack has reached 15 billion streams and spent two weeks at the top of Billboard’s top 200 albums chart, taking an Oscar, Grammy, and two Golden Globe Awards along the way.

This kind of monumental global success, of course, will draw both wanted and unwanted attention. Now that KPop Demon Hunters has taken the world by storm, a band called Demon Hunter has filed a lawsuit against Netflix. The Christian metal band has been around since the early 2000s and its corporate representative, Hyde Lane, has filed a trademark lawsuit in California targeting Netflix and live music promoter AEG Presents.

According to Complex, who has access to the complaint filed by Demon Hunter and their partners, they write that “Hyde Lane alleges trademark infringement, false designation of origin, and unfair competition.” The lawsuit alleges “complete overlap” with Demon Hunter’s brand that is “confusingly similar.” One example used is a from a parent who spent $500 on tickets to a Demon Hunter concert with plans of taking their 5 and 6-year-old children to what they thought was a KPop Demon Hunters show. The parent had reached out to the band, asking, “Is there any way to refund me or get me a credit or something? If I don’t get it refunded, I will not be able to purchase tickets to the actual KPop demon hunters show.”

Netflix has already filed trademark applications for merchandise for the upcoming AEG live global concert tour. Still, the lawsuit argues that Netflix and its partners are “massive companies that jealously guard and enforce their own intellectual property rights, willfully disregarding the rights of others in pursuit of profits.” Hyde Lane is asking for a jury trial to sort everything out in hopes of landing restitution and damages for Demon Hunter.

Above you can find Demon Hunter’s most popular video on YouTube, with 93,000 views. A quick listen will prove that there really is no similarity between this band and KPop Demon Hunters music. Further, the band’s image as white, male, Christian rockers really doesn’t overlap with the Korean pop music scene at all. The parent who purchased tickets to a Demon Hunter show should have looked closer or simply pulled up YouTube to clarify. This sounds more like simply exhausted parental error and less like the current legal fallacy at work.

Rolling Stone quoted additional parts of the complaint that make it clear that the band is simply irked by being overshadowed by a more successful brand:

“Simply put, Netflix is no more entitled to use the mark KPOP DEMON HUNTERS than it would be to launch a recording artist, live touring show, and merchandise under the marks KPOP METALLICA, KPOP U2 or KPOP BLACK SABBATH.”

This claim is quite the reach, because Metallica, U2, and Black Sabbath aren’t regularly used words. Is the band also going to sue the production companies of the 2005 movie Demon Hunter or the 2022 film Demon Hunters? How about the 2025 Demon Hunters? Probably not.

The legal filing asks for a judge to stop Netflix from using the KPop Demon Hunters name and “directing the U.S. Marshal to seize and impound” all merchandise and advertisements because “KPOP DEMON HUNTERS subsumes the entire DEMON HUNTER mark.” This is quite the nuclear option that makes it sound like Netflix created a show about a Christian metal band and not a story about a female Korean pop band.