DRAFTING W/ DANYA JIMENEZ & HANNAH MCMECHAN
Danya Jimenez and Hannah McMechan are the screenwriting duo behind K-Pop Demon Hunters, Netflix’s most-watched film ever globally. The 2025 animated action-musical — about a chart-topping girl group secretly battling demons — has detonated into full-blown fandom and earned two Oscar nominations along the way.
The two met as freshmen at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film and Television, bonding over comedy. After their first script landed in the Sundance Feature Lab, they were tapped by fellow screenwriter Nicole Perlman to help shape what would become a global breakout. Just 24 when they came aboard (Jimenez is now 29 and McMechan is 30), they recently won Best Writing, Feature at the Annies, where the film swept all 10 of its nominations.
For DRAFTING, Jimenez and McMechan revisit the fragments behind the hit: AirDropped jokes, early character memes, string-cheese-wrapper writers’ rooms and run-on Notes App ideas where the concepts first took shape.
We used to be substitute teachers and the kids were always trying to AirDrop stuff like this to us — and yeah, phone on 14% trying to find an apartment on Craigslist when we were supposed to be teaching. Clearly it was not our calling.
A meme we made and sent to Maggie when we first started writing KPDH. Early stage idea for the vibe between Jinu and Gwi-ma (Gwi-ma = BB = Big Bad).
Breakfast, lunch and dinner in our last writers room (string cheese wrappers if you can’t tell).
When people thought we were dating and we were so confused, but we were also posting shit like this.
We took so many photos of these chairs — like, actually thousands of photos at every different shooting location. Any time someone moved the chair, we took a photo, because it was our first time having them.
A pic from when we were deep in the throes of writing K-Pop for eight hours a day, but still trying to go out at night cause we were 24.
This is where it all starts: a poorly written Note with lots of run-on sentences and zero punctuation marks.
Our friends being supportive from the very beginning (don’t worry he was joking and we love him).
“You’re impossibly fast and strong. Your skin is pale white and ice cold. Your eyes change color and sometimes you speak like, like you’re from a different time. You never eat—”
