Foreign visitors to N Seoul Tower’s YTN Seoul Tower observatory hit 79,200 in September 2025, up 50.6 percent from 52,600 the same month a year earlier — the highest monthly foreign-visitor count tracked since 2024, according to an October 2025 report picked up by Munhwa Ilbo and other Korean outlets. The tower’s own analysis pointed to a single cause: “KPop Demon Hunters,” the animated Netflix film that had by then become the platform’s most-watched original ever, beating “Squid Game” to the top spot.
The film’s plot follows Huntrix, a fictional K-pop girl group who moonlight as demon hunters, across a Seoul rendered in enough real geographic detail that fans could map it. N Seoul Tower specifically appears as the site of the story’s climax: the boy group Saja Boys perform their final concert there, and Huntrix defeats the demon lord Gwima at the same location. Foreign fan communities began posting about visiting Namsan specifically because of the scene well before the tourism numbers confirmed it was happening at scale.
The tower isn’t a new attraction reinventing itself — it’s one of Seoul’s oldest, most photographed landmarks, the kind of site that shows up in guidebooks regardless of what’s currently popular. What the September numbers demonstrate is that a single animated sequence, once it becomes globally inescapable on a platform with Netflix’s reach, can still add tens of thousands of visitors to a location foreign tourists were already visiting anyway — less a discovery effect than a targeting effect, sending fans to the exact spot from the exact scene rather than Seoul in general.
Source: Munhwa Ilbo, October 2025, citing YTN Seoul Tower visitor data.
