Squid Game Ran 5.5 Times Longer Than a Title That Matched Its Reach
The Great Flood and Squid Game both peaked at number one in 93 countries, the widest reach in our panel of 974 Korean Netflix titles. Squid Game stayed on the charts 60 weeks. The Great Flood managed 11.
The table this is written from: /what-moves-english-reading
Three Korean Netflix titles reached the same widest tier of country coverage — all 93 tracked markets. One of them stayed on the charts more than five times as long as another.
What the numbers say
We read every weekly Netflix Top 10 country table for 974 Korean titles and counted, per title, how many of the 93 tracked markets it ever reached number one in, against how many weeks it appeared on any chart at all.
| Title | Markets reaching #1 | Weeks on a chart |
|---|---|---|
| Squid Game | 93 | 60 |
| All of Us Are Dead | 93 | 34 |
| The Great Flood | 93 | 11 |
| Hellbound | 92 | 9 |
| Carter | 92 | 5 |
Squid Game and The Great Flood both hit number one in every one of the 93 markets Netflix’s public tables track. Squid Game held some chart presence for 60 weeks. The Great Flood held it for 11 — 5.5x shorter, despite reaching the identical peak.
Why breadth and duration are different measurements
Reaching number one in 93 countries measures how far a title’s launch-week pull carries. Staying on a chart for weeks or months measures something else — whether people keep watching, rewatching, or newly discovering it well after release. A title can max out the first measurement in its opening days and still fall off every chart within weeks, which is what happened to The Great Flood.
What this can and cannot say
This cannot say why one title held on and the other didn’t — genre, a second season, or where a title landed on the release calendar could each explain a longer run, and this count has no way to separate them. What it establishes cleanly is that “reached number one everywhere” and “stayed on the charts a long time” are not the same claim, and a title can be true on one count while being nowhere close on the other.
More single-cause and multi-day spikes are tracked on our what-moves-english-reading hub.
These are statistics, not you. This is not investment advice.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Netflix Top 10 (public, weekly, per-country tables) — archive/raw/netflix-top10/countries.ndjson, weekly country lists, 2021-07-04 to 2026-08-23, 974 Korean titles tracked. · https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10/
What we checked
- 974 Korean titles have ever appeared on a Netflix weekly country Top 10 table in the tracked window.
- Widest reach (93 of 93 tracked markets, excluding Russia) is shared by three titles: All of Us Are Dead (34 weeks charting), Squid Game (60 weeks), The Great Flood (11 weeks).
- Squid Game's 60 weeks against The Great Flood's 11 is a 5.5x difference in how long each stayed on any country's chart, despite an identical peak reach.
- Carter and Hellbound follow at 92 of 93 markets — one country short of the widest tier — running 5 weeks and 9 weeks respectively.
What we left out, and why
- Any claim that reach causes longevity or the reverse. A title's genre, release calendar, and whether it got a second season could each affect how long it stays charting, and this count cannot separate them.
- Total audience size. Weeks-on-chart counts presence above a rank threshold, not how many people watched or for how long.
- Titles outside this 974-title Korean panel, and any country's chart before 2021-07-04, when Netflix's public weekly tables begin.
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 /what-moves-english-reading.
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