24 Netflix K-Titles Ran Long on a Weekly Chart — 21 of Them Never Left South Korea
Two thresholds set by the data itself — 6+ weeks on a country's Netflix top 10, charting in only 1 country — catch 24 Korean titles. Three genuinely travelled abroad. The other 21 never charted anywhere but South Korea.
The table this is written from: /netflix-top10-data
Ask what a “quiet hit” is and most lists answer with taste: a handful of titles someone decided were underrated. We wanted a version of that question with no taste in it, so we took every Korean-credited title we hold in Netflix’s own weekly top 10 data — 546 of them, across 93 countries and five years — and let the data set both thresholds itself: a long run is one at or above the median (6 weeks), and a narrow one is one at or below the bottom quarter for how many countries it ever charted in (1 country). Twenty-four titles clear both bars at once.
The Promise ran 36 weeks — in one country that is not South Korea
| Title | Type | Weeks on chart | Peak position | Only country |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Promise | TV | 36 | 2 | Philippines |
| Mr. Sunshine | TV | 23 | 7 | South Korea |
| Exhuma | Film | 13 | 1 | South Korea |
| It’s Okay to Not Be Okay | TV | 13 | 1 | Philippines |
| 12.12: The Day | Film | 12 | 1 | South Korea |
| Good Partner | TV | 12 | 1 | South Korea |
| The Killing Vote | TV | 11 | 2 | South Korea |
| Bad Guys | TV | 7 | 1 | Thailand |
| Decision to Leave | Film | 6 | 2 | South Korea |
The full list runs to 24 titles between 6 and 36 weeks, every one confined to a single country’s chart for its entire run. (The remaining 15 — Citizen of a Kind, My Mister, The Dream Life of Mr. Kim, Yadang: The Snitch, Miracle: Letters to the President, The Ugly, A Good Day to Be a Dog, Amazon Bullseye, Behind Every Star, In Our Prime, My Happy Ending, No Other Choice, Pale Moon, Parole Examiner Lee and The Witch — all ran 6 to 9 weeks, all in South Korea alone.)
Only three actually travelled
Of the 24, only three charted in a country other than South Korea, and none of them charted at home and abroad — each ran its whole streak in exactly one foreign market: The Promise and It’s Okay to Not Be Okay in the Philippines, Bad Guys in Thailand. The other 21 are titles that stayed on South Korea’s own weekly top 10 for one and a half to five and a half months and, by this chart, nowhere else at all.
The surprise is not the obscure ones
The list includes Decision to Leave — a Park Chan-wook film that won Best Director at Cannes the year it was released. By Netflix’s country-level weekly chart, it spent six weeks on South Korea’s top 10 and never appeared on any other country’s list. That is not a knock on the film; Netflix’s top 10 counts hours viewed within a country, and a title can be watched heavily abroad through a cinema release, a different platform, or word of mouth, none of which this chart sees. It is a reminder of what “quiet” means here: not obscure, just absent from every chart but one.
That absence runs in both directions. The same chart also holds titles that never once appeared on South Korea’s own weekly top 10 — 150 of them, travelling abroad while going unwatched, by this measure, at home.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Netflix (Tudum) — Weekly Top 10 by country, non-English TV and Films lists, 4 July 2021 to 23 August 2026, 93 countries, 546 Korean-credited titles considered · https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10
- Wikidata — Used to confirm the production company or cast credited on each title, by item number rather than by name · https://query.wikidata.org/
What we checked
- Both thresholds come from the measured distribution of the 546 titles we hold, not from a number we picked. The run-length cutoff (6 weeks) is the median run across those titles; the country-count cutoff (1 country) is the first quartile of how many countries they charted in.
- Charting is not the same as being available, and not charting is not the same as not being watched. Netflix publishes only each country's weekly top 10, so a title that is huge at home can be entirely absent from every other country's list without that meaning nobody abroad watched it.
- This is not a quality ranking. 'Quiet' describes chart geography, not merit — one of the twenty-one, Decision to Leave, won the director's prize at Cannes the same year it appears here as a six-week, one-country title.
What we left out, and why
- Not a claim that these are hidden gems discovered by a small foreign audience. Twenty-one of the twenty-four only ever charted in South Korea itself — the pattern here is mostly domestic staying power, not quiet foreign discovery.
- Not a ranking of the titles against each other. We report weeks and country count, not a combined score.
- Not a full accounting of any title's global reach. Streaming outside Netflix, physical or cinema release, and word of mouth are not measured here at all.
The data behind this
Written from the same data
If you work in this business
Everything on this page is measured from the same weekly Netflix lists, per market and per title. We publish the pages free; what we sell is the same measurement cut to one company's catalogue — including the figures behind /netflix-top10-data and /hit-or-flop.
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