Nearly three in ten Korean titles that reached a Netflix top 10 never left home

976 Korean titles have reached a Netflix weekly top 10 somewhere since July 2021. 438 of them — 44.9% — did it in exactly one country. For 274, that country was South Korea itself.

That is 28.1% of every Korean title on these lists: it charted at home and in none of the other 92 markets Netflix publishes a list for.

Films stay home. Series travel.

More than a third of Korean films that reach any top 10 reach only the Korean one. For series it is one in seven. This is a different cut of a gap we have measured before — Korean series reach about three times as many countries as Korean films — but the shape here is starker, because it counts the titles that went nowhere at all rather than comparing averages.

What staying home looks like

The two ends of this catalogue sit very far apart.

• I am Solo — a Korean reality series — held a top 10 place for 111 weeks, 112 chart places, every one of them in South Korea. It never appeared in another country’s top 10.
• Squid Game charted in 93 of 93 markets across 60 weeks.

Both are on the same lists. One of them is what “K-content went global” describes; the other ran for more than two years without leaving the country.

Most home-only titles are not like I am Solo. Their median run is 2 weeks and 2 chart places, and 61 of the 274 lasted exactly one week. Titles that did reach more than one country ran a median of 6 weeks across a median of 8 countries.

The share has roughly doubled — and here is why that number is readable

Grouped by the year a title first charted anywhere, the home-only share rises:

The obvious objection is that recent titles have had less time to travel. A title that first charted in 2021 has had five years; one from 2026 has had months. That alone could produce a rising line.

So we measured how long travelling actually takes. Of the 538 titles that reached more than one country, 333 — 62% — were in two countries in the same week. 74% reached their second country within four weeks, 84% within twenty-six.

Travel, when it happens, happens almost immediately. Dropping every title whose first chart week is inside the last six months leaves 906 titles with at least half a year of exposure, and the pattern is the same: 17% (2021), 22%, 30%, 39% (2024), 27% (2025), and 26.6% across the whole mature set.

⚠ The line is not straight. 2025 falls back to 27% after 2024’s 39%, and the 2026 figure rests on 87 titles in a part-year — 17 of them once the six-month filter is applied. What we can say is that the share roughly doubled between 2021 and 2024 and has not returned to its 2021 level. We cannot say it is still rising.

What this does not say

Charting in one country is not the same as being available in one country. Netflix publishes chart lists, not catalogues. A title absent from a country’s top 10 may still have been on Netflix there and simply never reached the top ten. We hold the chart lists and we do not guess the difference — so read every figure here as “did not chart elsewhere”, never as “was not released elsewhere”.

182 of the 274 home-only titles have fewer than six weekly rows in these files. This site does not publish an individual page for a title below that threshold, because a page built on two rows would say more than the data can support. They are counted here, where the group is the subject, and they are the reason the median run is two weeks.

Netflix also publishes no viewing figures in the per-country files, so nothing here measures how many people watched. A chart place is a rank, not an audience.