K Culture WireKorean pop culture, in numbers

Korea exports television to the world, not film

Name: Korea exports television to the world, not film
Creator: K Culture Wire

Netflix has published a global Top 10 every week since July 2021. Over 265 weeks,236 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.

Series22.20bn150 titles, 148m hours each on average, 5.3 weeks on the chart each. 41 of them reached number one.

Films1.53bn86 titles, 18m hours each, 2.42 weeks each.22 of them reached number one.

Korea puts a film on the global chart for every 1.74 series it puts there, and collects 14.5× the hours from the series side. Per title the gap is 8.3×.

The films are not failing to get noticed

	Titles	Reached #1	Rate	Weeks each	Hours each	Hours per week on chart
Series	150	41	27.3%	5.3	148m	28m
Films	86	22	25.6%	2.42	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: 2.42 weeks against 5.3. 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 3.8× 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	150	22.20bn	148m	8.3×
Series without Squid Game	149	17.15bn	115m	6.5×
Films	86	1.53bn	18m	—

Removing the biggest title in the catalogue moves the per-title gap from 8.3× to 6.5×. 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
Officer Black Belt57m · 4w
Ballerina51m · 5w
Desire45m · 2w
Love Untangled44m · 6w

The largest Korean film in five years, The Great Flood at 149m hours, has been out-watched by 33 separate Korean series.

What we wrote from this data

Netflix never says where a show is from. Every count of Korean content on it is an inference — including ours.
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.
7 August 2026
236 Korean titles have charted on Netflix worldwide. One of them is a fifth of all the viewing.
Five years of Netflix's global Top 10 hold 23.7 billion hours of Korean viewing. Squid Game is 21.3% of it, the 50 biggest titles are nearly three-quarters, and reaching number one multiplies a show's hours without lengthening its run.
6 August 2026 · corrected

Where these numbers come from

Netflix — Top 10 weekly global hours viewed (Tudum), 265 consecutive weeks from 2021-07-04 to 2026-07-26. 출처: 넷플릭스 Tudum 주간 글로벌 Top 10.
Korean titles are identified by Wikidata country of origin (P495 = Q884), matched on title text. n = 236 titles, 1003 title-weeks on the chart.
🔴 Corrected 2026-08-07. Title-text matching had counted 52 titles from Netflix's English-language charts as Korean — 2.63bn 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 8 more titles (The East Palace, Teach You a Lesson, The Empress, Fighter, Animal, Forgotten Love, Paradise, Hunger).
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. 79.8% of the viewing sits on titles only Korean works carry — those cannot be mismatched by a text rule. 17% sits on titles a foreign work shares the name with, and 3.2% 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.
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.

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