Every Netflix country had a Korean title by Sept 2021

Netflix has published a weekly top 10 for each country since 4 July 2021. Five years and 269 weeks later, we went through all 501,040 rows and asked a question with a short answer: which countries have ever put a Korean title in one of those top 10s?

All of them.

Every country in the file has charted a Korean title at least once — 94 in the raw data, 93 once Russia is set aside, as it is everywhere on this site. There is no country on the list that Korean television and film has not reached at least once.

The more interesting number is when.

The map filled in over twelve weeks, then stopped

Twenty-eight countries were already charting a Korean title in the first week Netflix published — 4 July 2021, when Vincenzo was fifth in Bangladesh and Stepmom was in the top ten in Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador and El Salvador on the same day.

The last country to appear for the first time did so on 26 September 2021.

That is twelve weeks into a record that now runs to 269. In the four years and eleven months since, not one country has charted its first Korean title. There were none left to.

Six of the last eight doors say Squid Game

Squid Game arrived on 17 September 2021. In the two weeks that followed, eight countries charted a Korean title for the first time in the published record, and for six of them — the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Ukraine — the first Korean title they ever charted was Squid Game itself.

It did not arrive the same way in each. In the Czech Republic and the Netherlands it entered on 19 September at eighth and ninth. A week later, on 26 September, it entered Hungary, Ireland, Slovakia and Ukraine at number two in all four on the same day.

The seventh country whose first Korean title was Squid Game was Russia, also at number two that week, which we set aside. The eighth country in the two-week window was Australia, on 19 September, with Payback at number ten.

We want to be careful about what that does and does not establish. It does not say Squid Game “opened” those markets in any commercial sense — Netflix was already operating in all of them, and Korean titles were certainly being watched there. It says something narrower and checkable: in the record Netflix publishes, those six countries had never had a Korean title high enough to appear, and the first one that did was this one.

The limit that matters most

The record begins on 4 July 2021. A country’s first appearance in this data is its first appearance in this data.

That is not a small caveat. Korean dramas had been travelling for two decades before Netflix published a single country chart, and twenty-eight countries were already charting a Korean title in the very first week we can see — for them, the beginning happened somewhere we cannot look. What we can say is bounded by the file, and we would rather state the boundary than write around it.

Within that boundary, the shape is clear: the map was complete by week twelve, and the story since has not been about reaching new countries. It has been about how many places a title takes once it is there, and how much of each country’s chart Korean titles hold — which is a different question, with a much less tidy answer.