Netflix has published a global Top 10 every week since July 2021. Over 268 weeks,237 Korean titles reached it. Split them the way Netflix splits its own charts — series on one side, films on the other — and the two sides are not the same business.
Similar number of titles. Fifteen times the viewing.
Series22.49bn149 titles, 151m hours each on average, 5.39 weeks on the chart each. 41 of them reached number one.
Films1.56bn88 titles, 18m hours each, 2.48 weeks each.23 of them reached number one.
Korea puts a film on the global chart for every 1.69 series it puts there, and collects 14.5× the hours from the series side. Per title the gap is 8.5×.
The films are not failing to get noticed
Titles
Reached #1
Rate
Weeks each
Hours each
Hours per week on chart
Series
149
41
27.5%
5.39
151m
28m
Films
88
23
26.1%
2.48
18m
7m
A quarter of the Korean films that chart at all go to number one — close to the series rate. Getting attention is not where the two diverge. What the films do not do is stay: 2.48 weeks against 5.39. Some of that is what a film is — you watch it once — which is why the last column divides by weeks anyway, and the gap is still 3.9× in the week each is actually on the chart.
One title does not explain it
Squid Game alone is 5.05bn hours, a fifth of everything Korean on this chart. Take it out entirely and the series side still carries the comparison.
Titles
Hours
Hours per title
vs films
All series
149
22.49bn
151m
8.5×
Series without Squid Game
148
17.44bn
118m
6.7×
Films
88
1.56bn
18m
—
Removing the biggest title in the catalogue moves the per-title gap from 8.5× to 6.7×. It does not close it. This is the shape of the catalogue, not one outlier.
The biggest of each
Series
Squid Game5048m · 42w
Extraordinary Attorney Woo662m · 21w
All of Us Are Dead660m · 11w
Queen of Tears654m · 15w
The Glory561m · 13w
Bon Appétit, Your Majesty512m · 10w
When Life Gives You Tangerines482m · 9w
King the Land447m · 11w
Films
The Great Flood149m · 7w
Badland Hunters75m · 4w
Kill Boksoon66m · 8w
Carter64m · 4w
Desire59m · 5w
Officer Black Belt57m · 4w
Ballerina51m · 5w
Love Untangled44m · 6w
The largest Korean film in five years, The Great Flood at 149m hours, has been out-watched by 34 separate Korean series.
What our panel is a share of
Our panel only contains titles that reached a Netflix Top 10, so it has never had a denominator. This counts what Wikidata records as Korean film and television, whole and from 2021 on, to put one under it.
Type
Recorded as Korean
Since 2021
In our panel
Share of all
Share since 2021
Films
10,253
1,126
172
1.7%
15.3%
Television series
4,766
785
249
5.2%
31.7%
These shares are ceilings, not estimates. Wikidata records what someone wrote down, not what was made. These counts are therefore a floor on output and our coverage share is a ceiling — if more was made than is recorded, our share is lower than shown, never higher. The panel underneath is our own — 421 titles, built from src/data/wikitip-titles.json, the same file the title panel reads.
And the two right-hand columns are not comparable to each other. Year comes from P577 (publication date) or P580 (start time) — films carry the first, series the second. Items with neither are excluded from the chart-era rows, so those rows are not comparable to the whole-catalogue rows. Films without a recorded year number 713 and series 967.
Our panel never had a denominator. Wikidata records 785 Korean series and 1,126 Korean films from the chart era; 249 series and 172 films reached a Top 10. Series are twice as likely to be seen at all.
The weekly charts carry nine columns and none is country of production. Match titles by name, as everyone must, and 17% of Korean viewing sits on names another country also uses. We measured the gap and publish its size.
Five years of Netflix's global Top 10 hold 23.7 billion hours of Korean viewing across 236 titles. One of them is a fifth of it. Every title listed.
6 August 2026 · corrected
Where these numbers come from
Netflix — Top 10 weekly global hours viewed (Tudum), 268 consecutive weeks from 2021-07-04 to 2026-08-16. Source: Netflix Tudum weekly global Top 10.
Korean titles are identified by Wikidata country of origin (P495 = Q884), matched on title text. n = 237 titles, 1021 title-weeks on the chart.
🔴 Corrected 2026-08-07. Title-text matching had counted 49 titles from Netflix's English-language charts as Korean — 3.08bn hours, including The Perfect Couple, Suits and Hit Man, none of them Korean. Netflix splits its charts by a title's primary language, so only the Non-English charts are counted here.
Hand-checked as far as 30 series and 20 films by hours — about two-thirds of the hours on each side. That removed 14 more titles (The East Palace, Teach You a Lesson, Breathless, Uninvited, The Empress, Fighter, Animal, Money Heist, Paradise, Hunger, One More Time, Dangerous Liaisons, Restless, Undercover).
The rest of the catalogue is measured rather than eyeballed. We asked Wikidata, for every title we count, which countries made a film or series with exactly that name. 83.6% of the viewing sits on titles only Korean works carry — those cannot be mismatched by a text rule. 15.9% sits on titles a foreign work shares the name with, and 0.4% on titles Wikidata gives no country for. A shared name is not an error; it is the part we cannot settle from text, and this is its size. The test in the data's own words: “Every title we count is asked of Wikidata: which countries produced a film or TV series with exactly this English label. A title only Korean works carry cannot be mismatched by our title-text rule. A shared title means we cannot tell from the text alone which work charted — it does not mean the entry is wrong.” It was run over 243 titles carrying 24.41bn hours — and over 975 titles in all, because the Southeast Asian country charts publish no hours but are put through the same test. The largest titles whose names are shared, and the countries that share them:
The Glory — 561m hours · also People's Republic of China
Bloodhounds — 353m hours · also United States
Love Next Door — 340m hours · also Thailand
Business Proposal — 279m hours · also Hong Kong
True Beauty — 242m hours · also Canada, United States
Little Women — 164m hours · also Japan, United Kingdom, United States
What this page counted before the filter existed. 298 titles and 29.90bn hours. Removing the English-chart titles and the hand-checked ones leaves 237 titles and 24.04bn hours, which is what you see above. The hours close exactly. The title counts do not: 298 − 63 is 235, not 237. 2 titles charted on both an English and a Non-English list — Ballerina and Hierarchy — so their English weeks are removed while their Non-English weeks are kept, and they sit in the removed count and the kept count at once. We print the gap rather than round it away.
Series and films are Netflix's own categories, not ours. A limited series is TV here because Netflix charts it as TV.
Only the top ten exists in this data. A Korean film watched widely that never breaks the weekly top ten contributes nothing above. This measures the top of the chart, not Korean viewing.
Nothing here says why. Release strategy, how many films Korea makes for Netflix at all, and the recommendation weighting behind a chart position are none of them in the published data.