Korean pop culture, in numbers

How far Korean titles travel in Southeast Asia

421 Korean titles have reached a Netflix Top 10 in Southeast Asia — Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam across 269 weeks, 2021-07-04 to 2026-08-23. Sorted by how many of the six markets each one reached, they do not form a curve.

Two piles, and very little in between

43.9% reached all six and 31.8% reached exactly one. The four middle rows hold 24.2% between them. A Korean title released into this region mostly behaves as a regional release or a single-market event, and rarely as anything else. The full story →

What each pile is made of

ReachedTitlesShareAvg weeksSeries / filmsHit #1 somewhere
6 of 618543.9%8.4146 / 39124
5 of 6204.8%618 / 23
4 of 6255.9%4.216 / 94
3 of 6235.5%512 / 113
2 of 6348.1%2.713 / 217
1 of 613431.8%2.744 / 9016

The titles that reach all six also last longest once there — 8.4 weeks on average against 2.7 for the single-market titles. Whatever carries a title across the region also keeps it on the chart when it arrives.

What each end looks like

Reached all six

  • Alchemy of Souls 45w · peak #1
  • Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha 34w · peak #1
  • Squid Game 29w · peak #1
  • Extraordinary Attorney Woo 29w · peak #1
  • Business Proposal 27w · peak #1
  • Solo Leveling 27w · peak #1
  • The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call 27w · peak #1
  • Taxi Driver 25w · peak #1

Reached one

  • The Promise 36w · peak #2
  • Prison Playbook 21w · peak #2
  • It's Okay to Not Be Okay 13w · peak #1
  • Stepmother 9w · peak #4
  • Guardian: The Lonely and Great God 9w · peak #5
  • Vagabond 8w · peak #1
  • Bad Guys 7w · peak #1
  • Sunshine 6w · peak #1

The right-hand column is not a list of failures. Three of those eight reached number one in the market they did chart in, and The Promise held a Top 10 place for 36 weeks — longer than anything in the left-hand column. They travelled to one country and stayed. What separates the two sides is reach, and reach is not the same thing as doing well.

Series travel. Films mostly do not.

FormatTitlesAvg countriesAvg weeksReached all sixHit #1 somewhere
Series2494.567.5146105
Films1722.592.83952

Part of the weeks column is mechanical and we are not hiding it. A film is one sitting and a series is sixteen episodes, so a series holds a chart slot longer almost by construction. The countries column is not a runtime artefact — reaching Indonesia and not Thailand is a separate event from staying on a chart for six weeks — and on that measure the gap is nearly two markets.

What we could not verify. Netflix labels its global chart by a title’s primary language; country charts carry no language field. 215 of these titles have never reached a global Top 10, so that check cannot be applied to them and they are included on a title-text match alone. They are the small ones — the median title in that group charted in a single country — but the share is large enough that we print it rather than leave you to find it. Where the label does exist it does work: 38 titles matched a Korean work by name but sit on Netflix’s English charts and are out, and 18 more came out by hand.

What we wrote from this data

Where these numbers come from

← Back to the front page