K Culture WireKorean pop culture, in numbers

Do Korean titles spread across the world, or land on it?

Name: Do Korean titles spread across the world, or land on it?
Creator: K Culture Wire

A distributor plans differently depending on the answer. If titles spread, the first market is a decision. If they land, every market has to be ready in the same week. Of the 915 Korean titles that charted anywhere across 265 weeks, we took the 166 that reached 20 countries or more and measured how much of that footprint was already there in week one.

When a Korean title reaches many countries, does it start in one and spread, or appear in many at once?

The median title is already in 14 countries in its first week

How this is counted. A title’s first week is the earliest week it appears on any country list. First-week share is how many of its eventual countries were already there in that week.

	Median
Countries reached in the end	43
Countries in the first week	14
Share of the footprint already there	39.1%

We asked the wrong question first. The original plan was to find the gateway market — the country a travelling title shows up in before the others. There is no gateway: the middle title appears in 14 countries in the same week. So the question became how much of the footprint that first week is.

And it is not one pattern but two

Share of countries reached in week one	Titles	Share	Median countries	Films	Series
under 25%	58	34.9%	37	19	39
25–49%	42	25.3%	41	7	35
50–74%	33	19.9%	59	16	17
75% or more	33	19.9%	52	12	21

The two ends are almost the same size — 58 titles built their footprint over weeks, 33 had it on day one. Averaging them produces a title that does not exist.

The ones that built it week by week

Title	Countries	In week one	Share	First week	Started in
Ballerina	89	1	1.1%	2021-10-24	New Zealand
Black Knight	79	1	1.3%	2021-08-01	Bahrain
Happy Ending	47	1	2.1%	2022-11-27	Thailand
Land	43	1	2.3%	2023-01-01	Turkey
Sweet Home	42	1	2.4%	2023-11-12	Thailand
Our Unwritten Seoul	40	1	2.5%	2025-05-25	Indonesia
Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha	40	1	2.5%	2021-08-29	Indonesia
Miss Night and Day	38	1	2.6%	2024-06-16	South Korea

The ones that were everywhere at once

Title	Countries	In week one	Share	First week	Format
The Devil's Plan	23	23	100%	2023-10-01	Series
Physical: Asia	44	44	100%	2025-11-02	Series
Dynamite Kiss	52	52	100%	2025-11-16	Series
Outlaw	53	53	100%	2024-09-15	Film
Humint	67	67	100%	2026-04-05	Film
The Great Flood	93	93	100%	2025-12-21	Film
The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure	67	66	98.5%	2022-03-06	Film
Tastefully Yours	54	53	98.1%	2025-05-18	Series

Films land more often than series — a median 50% of the footprint in week one across 54 films, against 37.8% across 112 series. A film has one week to be seen; a series can pick up a market in its third.

What we wrote from this data

Korean titles reach the world two ways, and the average of them describes neither
Among 166 Korean titles that reached 20 countries or more, the first week already holds a median 39.1% of the countries they ever reach. But 58 of them started under 25% and 33 were nearly everywhere at once.
9 August 2026

Where these numbers come from, and what they cannot answer

Netflix — Netflix Top 10 (Tudum) weekly country lists; Korean titles identified via Wikidata country of origin (P495 = Q884) and by Wikidata item number where we hold one
This is not a release schedule. We observe when a title appears on a country’s top 10, not when Netflix made it available there. A title released everywhere on the same day can still take weeks to chart in some markets, and that is what this measures.
We do not say why a title spread. A country can be added because more people started watching or because the titles above it fell away. Nothing here separates those.
Titles below 20 countries are excluded from the shares, because a first-week share computed on three countries carries no information.
Russia is excluded from every figure on this site.

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