Korean pop culture, in numbers

Hit or flop?

We are not going to tell you. Netflix publishes no budget, no revenue and no viewing hours by country, so nobody working from this data can tell you either — and we would rather say that plainly than dress a rank up as a verdict.

What we can do is give you the thing the word “flop” is really reaching for: somewhere to stand. Between 2021-07-04 and 2026-08-23, 974 Korean titles entered a country’s Netflix weekly top 10 at least once. Here is how far each of them got, and where the titles people ask about sit inside that.

“Number one on Netflix” is not the rare part. 304 of the 974 titles — 31% — have been number one in some country in some week. Number one in one small market for one week is common. What separates titles is how many countries they reached and how long they stayed, and on both of those the spread is enormous: from one country for one week to 93 countries for 112 weeks.

Look at how far “number one” actually reaches. More Korean titles have been number one somewhere (304) than have ever charted in fifty countries (67). And 65 of the 304 — 21%, one in five — were number one in the only country that ever charted them. That is not a criticism of those titles. It is what the phrase “number one on Netflix” is capable of meaning, and we would rather you saw the range before you read a rank as a verdict.

How many countries a Korean title reaches

Countries that ever charted itTitlesShare
144746%
2–421122%
5–9788%
10–2410010%
25–49717%
50+677%

447 titles — 46% of everything that ever charted — reached exactly one country and nowhere else. The middle title reached 2 countries. You need 40 countries to be in the top tenth, and 89 to be in the top hundredth.

This is a distribution, not a standard. There is no number on this table that a title is supposed to hit. Most of what Netflix carries charts narrowly, and that is what narrow looks like — not a failure of anything.

How long a Korean title stays on a chart

Distinct weeks with a place somewhereTitlesShare
115616%
2–332633%
4–831332%
9–2014915%
21+303%

The middle title held a place for 4 weeks. 156 titles (16%) appeared for a single week and never again, and 134 titles were on one chart, in one country, for one week — that is the whole record we hold for them.

The titles people ask this about

These 9 are not our pick. They are the titles that people actually typed “hit or flop” after and then landed on this site, taken from our own Search Console figures for the four weeks to 2026-08-26. We found chart rows for 9 of them.

TitleCountriesWeeksBest rankWider thanCharted
Confidential Assignment 2: International film311160%2023-01-08 to 2026-05-31
A Model Family series204283%2022-08-14 to 2022-09-04
Concrete Utopia film29146%2023-12-10 to 2024-04-07
Extraordinary You series1350%2022-04-10 to 2022-04-24
Our Blues series1216178%2022-04-17 to 2022-07-31
Dali & Cocky Prince series84473%2022-07-31 to 2022-08-21
Delightfully Deceitful series32760%2025-07-27 to 2025-08-03
The Childe film28146%2023-12-17 to 2026-04-12
To My Beloved Thief series28346%2026-01-11 to 2026-03-01

“Wider than” is the share of all 974 charting Korean titles that reached fewer countries than this one. It is a position in the pack, and nothing more. It is not a score, it does not go up when a title is good, and two titles a percentage point apart are not meaningfully different.

For scale: the widest 15

The far end of the same distribution, so the numbers above have a ceiling to sit under.

TitleCountriesWeeksBest rank
Squid Game93601
All of Us Are Dead93341
The Great Flood93111
Hellbound9291
Carter9251
The Glory91291
My Name9191
Desire9051
Ballerina89181
Badland Hunters89101
Officer Black Belt8971
Bloodhounds87171
JUNG_E8741
Kill Boksoon84111
Parasyte: The Grey84111

What this page cannot answer

The word “flop” usually means money. None of the four things below are in this data, and no arrangement of chart ranks will produce them.

This is a statistic, not a judgement of a film, a cast, or anyone’s work. If a title you care about sits at the narrow end, that is where its chart rows sit — it is not a statement about the title, and we are not making one.

14 seconds, with sound

Fourteen seconds, read aloud: more Korean titles have been number one somewhere than have ever reached fifty countries. Sixty-five of them were number one in the only country that ever charted them. A chart place is a rank in one country in one week, not viewers and not money. Free to repost with the address on it.

All our short films — each one built from a table on this site

Where to walk from here

The Korean titles on this week’s charts · The ones that ran and ran, almost nowhere · Three measures of “most popular” that disagree · Korean films, counted separately · Every country, and how Korean its chart is · How long titles hold a place · Every Korean title we hold

How this was measured

Netflix's own weekly top 10 files by country, 2021-07-04 to 2026-08-23, across 93 countries and 269 weeks. Countries counts every market that ever listed the title. Weeks counts distinct weeks in which it held a place anywhere, so a title in three countries in the same week counts that week once. The nine titles in the middle table come from this site's own Google Search Console query export for the four weeks to 2026-08-26, not from an editorial choice. Netflix publishes films and series as two separate weekly lists; a name that appears on both is two different works and we do not add them together.

What this cannot tell you

A chart place is a rank against other titles in one country in one week. It is not a viewing figure, an audience count or a revenue figure, and a small market counts exactly the same as a large one here. Netflix publishes no budget and no revenue, so this page cannot say whether anything made money, which is what "hit or flop" usually means. Titles that never entered any country's weekly top 10 leave no row at all, so this data cannot tell "reached few people" apart from "not in our files". Netflix states no country of production; which titles count as Korean is our inference from the title text and from Wikidata, and we correct it when we find it wrong.

What we wrote from this data