A title appears on a country chart at some position. That is the one fact anyone has on the first Monday. Does it say anything about how long the title will be there?
Korean series opening at 1 — median 6 weeks. Opening at 10 — 1.
Everything below is an average over thousands of runs, and the spread inside every position is wide. Of the runs that opened at position 8, 24% still reached four weeks; of those that opened at number one, 9.6% did not. A single title can sit anywhere in that spread.
| Opened at | Runs | Median weeks | Lasting 4+ weeks | Gone after one week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 488 | 6 | 90.4% | 0.4% |
| 2 | 460 | 5 | 76.5% | 3.7% |
| 3 | 604 | 4 | 63.6% | 6.8% |
| 4 | 715 | 4 | 50.8% | 12.3% |
| 5 | 788 | 3 | 44.7% | 19.7% |
| 6 | 837 | 2 | 33.9% | 28.3% |
| 7 | 873 | 2 | 26.5% | 36.9% |
| 8 | 1,014 | 2 | 24% | 42.4% |
| 9 | 1,008 | 1 | 20.9% | 50.8% |
| 10 | 1,139 | 1 | 16.6% | 56.2% |
A run is one title in one country across consecutive chart weeks. The entry position is where it sat in the first week of that run; the length is how many weeks the run lasted.
The middle of the table is where it turns. Above position five most runs reach four weeks; below it most do not.
Korean films and Korean series behave differently on these charts, so they are never mixed. Every non-Korean title is measured the same way, because "entering higher lasts longer" could be true of every chart everywhere.
| Runs | Median weeks opening at 1 | Opening at 10 | Weeks per position | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Korean series | 7,926 | 6 | 1 | 0.56 |
| Every other series | 78,981 | 5 | 1 | 0.44 |
| Korean films | 3,853 | 4 | 1 | 0.33 |
| Every other film | 117,293 | 3 | 1 | 0.22 |
Positions run from 1 to 10 and nothing else, so the difference between the two ends divided by the nine steps between them is the whole relationship. A regression would hide the assumptions inside a coefficient; this way the table is the argument.
Position is worth more in series than in films — 0.56 and 0.44 against 0.33 and 0.22. A film's run is short whatever it opens at, so there is less room for the opening to matter.
And it is worth more for Korean titles in both formats: 0.56 against 0.44 in series, 0.33 against 0.22 in films.
That is a different statement from "Korean titles last longer", which is true of series only. This one says the first week tells you more — the distance between a good opening and a bad one is wider.
This is what happened on average to runs that opened at each position; it is not a forecast for any one title, and the spread inside every position is wide. It also says nothing about viewing — a top 10 is a rank list, and Netflix publishes no country-level viewing figures.
It also cannot tell you why. A title that opens at number one had something behind it — a marketing push, a returning cast, a second season — and none of that is in a rank table. The opening position is a symptom of whatever produced it, not a cause of what follows.
How long a title holds a chart · How a title leaves · Is the week it enters its highest · How we count
Opening position is the only fact anyone has on the first Monday. Across 7,926 Korean series runs it moves expected length by 0.56 weeks a step — against 0.44 for other series, 0.33 for Korean films and 0.22 for other films.
10 August 2026