Did Korea chart it first?

Korea led for 46 of 397

• Korea first46 · 11.6%
• Same week160 · 40.3%
• Korea later51 · 12.8%
• Never in Korea140 · 35.3%

The largest group by far is the one where the two charts move together. The second largest is the one where Korea's chart never carried the title at all — 140 titles, 35.3% of everything that reached Southeast Asia. The full story →

The same measurement, three ways

Why three rows and not one. The panel begins at 2021-07-04, so a title already charting that week may have started earlier than we can see — 11 of them are removed in the second row. And a title is keyed by its name, so a film and a series sharing a name look like one work that led or lagged by years; the 9 names in that position come out in the third. The same-week share moves by 1.6 points across all three. We print all of them rather than pick the flattering one.

The names we set aside. Glitch, Kingdom, Last Summer, Mine, Once Again, One Night Stand, Only You, Start-Up, Tunnel — 9 titles where a Korean film and a Korean series share a name, 7 of them inside the group that charted on both sides. They stay in every count above, where only the first week matters, and come out of anything measured in weeks.

"Same week" is not "same day"

Netflix publishes one list per week. A title that entered Korea's chart on a Monday and Jakarta's on the following Friday appears here as a single simultaneous entry. Any lead shorter than seven days is invisible to this table. That is a limit of the source, not a finding, and it is the first thing to know before reading the row above.

The two sides are not mirror images. When Korea led, it led by a median of 7 weeks. When Southeast Asia led, the median was 86 weeks — those are catalogue titles finding a second audience abroad a year or two later, not releases running ahead of Korea. Measured in weeks here excludes the shared names, for the reason in the row above.

The longest gaps on each side

The right-hand column is not the left-hand column reversed. Its gaps are two to four years wide, which is not a release schedule — those are older titles that Southeast Asian audiences found on Netflix long before the same title surfaced on Korea's chart. The left-hand gaps are mostly films arriving on Netflix in Korea after a cinema run and reaching the rest of the region later still.

Series enter together. Films do not.

Part of this is mechanical and we are not hiding it. A Netflix series is released to every country at once, so the only thing that can separate the two charts is how hard each one is to enter — 72.5% of series enter both in the same week. Korean films often run in Korean cinemas long before reaching Netflix anywhere, and they split almost evenly between arriving in Korea first (21) and arriving later (24).

15 titles charted in all six countries and never once in Korea

This is not a room problem. Korea's list has exactly the same number of places as Singapore's — 5,300 rows each, ten titles times two lists times 265 weeks. The collector refuses to run if those counts differ between any two of the seven markets, because the whole comparison rests on them being equal.

An explanation we tested and dropped

Our first guess: these are television dramas Koreans watched when they aired on KBS, SBS, tvN or JTBC, so they never needed Netflix for them. If that were right, the never-charted group should be full of titles with a Korean broadcaster and the charted group should not.

It goes the wrong way. The titles that did chart in Korea are the ones more likely to have aired on Korean television, and we do not have a replacement explanation. One detail nearly fooled us. Ignoring format, the same comparison reads 39.0% against 66.4% — a gap three times larger, pointing the way we expected. That gap is format mix: the never-charted group is 83 films and 57 series, films rarely carry a broadcaster field at all, and the number was measuring how many films were in each group.