Korean pop culture, in numbers

Dream

A Korean film that reached a Netflix weekly top 10 in 21 of 93 countries, holding 43 chart places across 6 weeks between 2023-07-30 and 2023-09-03. Its best position anywhere was number 1.

It reached 21 of the 93 countries — further than 92% of the Korean films in this data. It reached number one in 4 of them — Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Its longest presence was in South Korea, where it held 6 chart places. Its widest single week was 2023-07-30, when it sat on 20 country charts at once.

Dream on Netflix, country by country — all 21 markets

MarketPlacesBest positionFirst weekLast week
Bahrain172023-07-302023-07-30
Bangladesh222023-07-302023-08-06
Hong Kong332023-07-302023-08-13
India182023-07-302023-07-30
Indonesia312023-07-302023-08-13
Japan212023-07-302023-08-06
Kuwait1102023-07-302023-07-30
Malaysia222023-07-302023-08-06
Maldives262023-07-302023-08-06
New Caledonia192023-08-062023-08-06
Peru182023-07-302023-07-30
Philippines232023-07-302023-08-06
Qatar122023-07-302023-07-30
Réunion292023-07-302023-08-06
Singapore222023-07-302023-08-06
South Korea612023-07-302023-09-03
Sri Lanka162023-07-302023-07-30
Taiwan412023-07-302023-08-20
Thailand222023-07-302023-08-06
United Arab Emirates142023-07-302023-07-30
Vietnam322023-07-302023-08-13

Markets are in alphabetical order, not in order of size. A market name is a link only where that country has a page of its own; the rest are plain text rather than a link that goes nowhere.

What a place is. A place is one appearance in one country's weekly top 10. A title that sat at number 4 in Vietnam for three weeks holds three places there. Reach counts the countries a title appeared in at least once, out of 93.

Charted here is not the same as available here. A chart place does show the title was on Netflix in that country that week — that much follows. The reverse does not: a country missing from this list may still have carried the title without it reaching a top 10. We hold chart lists, not catalogue listings, and we do not guess the difference.

Dream — hit or flop?

We will not say, and neither can the chart. Netflix's country lists record that a title held a top-ten place in a country in a week. They do not record how many people watched it, what it cost, or what anyone expected of it — and those are the three things the words hit and flop are actually about.

What we can tell you is where it sits. Of the 546 Korean titles with a page here, 142 reached more markets than Dream and 390 reached fewer. It travelled further than the typical Korean title that charted at all, which reached 2.

That is a position, not a verdict. A title can hold a hundred chart places in small markets and a title can hold four in the largest ones; the file does not say which of those a person means by success. You have the shape — the judgement is yours.

Beside the median charting Korean title

DreamMedian Korean title that charted
Markets reached212
Weeks on a chart somewhere64
Chart places held435

The median is taken across all 974 Korean titles that reached any country top 10, most of which charted in one or two markets. This is a comparison, not a ranking — we do not publish a league of titles, and a title well above the median is a title that travelled, not a title that is better.

All at once, or one country at a time

It reached 21 markets in all. The most that held it in the same week was 20 — the week of 2023-07-30.

Those two figures are different achievements. Reaching 21 markets over 6 weeks and holding 20 of them in one week are not the same event, and a single "markets" column cannot tell them apart. Netflix publishes neither figure; both are counted here from the weekly country lists.

How it left. Counting each country separately, it ended 21 runs on a chart. The middle one ended from position 8, and 11 of 21 ended from positions 8 to 10. Across all Korean titles that figure is 56.8%, and it would be 30% if leaving had nothing to do with position — how a title leaves has the whole table.

Every run this title had, market by market

A run is a stretch of consecutive weeks on one country's chart. A title that leaves and comes back later has two runs there, because those are two separate events — and this one never did: every market held it once and then it was gone.

MarketRunsPlacesLongest runLeft from position
South Korea166 weeks6
Taiwan144 weeks10
Hong Kong133 weeks10
Indonesia133 weeks9
Vietnam133 weeks9
Bangladesh122 weeks7
Japan122 weeks5
Malaysia122 weeks7
Maldives122 weeks8
Philippines122 weeks9
Réunion122 weeks9
Singapore122 weeks5
Thailand122 weeks6
Bahrain111 week7
India111 week8
Kuwait111 week10
New Caledonia111 week9
Peru111 week8
Qatar111 week2
Sri Lanka111 week6
United Arab Emirates111 week4

11 of 21 runs ended from positions 8 to 10. Across every Korean title that figure is 56.8%, and it would be 30% if leaving had nothing to do with position — how a title leaves has the whole table.

It was rarely alone. In the weeks and countries where it charted, an average of 4.12 other Korean titles were on the same chart, and it had the country's Korean places to itself in 7% of them. Two titles from one company on the same chart cost each other about half a position — we measured that.

Counted from 499,180 weekly country chart rows. The week-by-week path of a title, the full company catalogue table and the titles that never charted remain in the company sheet. What is here is the per-market summary: how many separate runs, the longest, and the position each run ended from.

Where to walk from here

Other Korean titles on this site that share a named person or a credited company with Dream. The reason is given beside each one, because a shared name is the only claim being made — not that the two are alike.

Put this title in context

The same weekly files, cut five other ways. Each of these answers a question this page cannot: not what happened to Dream, but what happened around it.

Dream production companies

CompanyCredited as
Plus M EntertainmentDistribution (배급)

From Wikidata, listed alphabetically. Company names link through to a sheet where we hold one; we publish a sheet only for companies whose catalogue we can see completely, so most names here are text. A credit is not a share of the work — it records that a company is attached, not how much of the budget or the decision it held. Companies inside one corporate group are listed separately because we did not confirm the ownership tree. The credit type is given in English with the original Korean label in brackets, because that label is what the filing says and translating it away would hide the source.

Dream cast

13 names recorded as Korean, alphabetically. Wikidata cast lists are incomplete and skew toward better-known names, so this is not a full cast list and a short one does not mean a small production.

Baek Ji-won · Heo Jun-seok · Hong Wan-pyo · IU · Jung Seung-kil · Kang Ha-neul · Kim Jong-soo · Ko Chang-seok · Lee Eun-jae · Lee Ha-nee · Lee Hyun-woo · Park Seo-joon · Yang Hyeon-min

8 of these 13 names have pages of their own here, showing every other charting title they appear in and how far each one travelled. The rest do not, because we hold fewer than two charting titles for them.

Was Dream a hit or a flop?

We are not going to rule on that, and neither can anyone else working from this data. Netflix publishes no budget, no revenue and no viewing hours by country, so a chart position cannot be turned into a verdict. Several Korean titles opened in cinemas first, and that run is not in this data at all.

What we can give you is the thing the word “flop” is really reaching for: somewhere to stand. Of the 974 Korean titles that entered any country’s Netflix weekly top 10 between 2021-07-04 and 2026-08-23, here is where Dream sits.

MeasureDreamWhere that puts it
Countries that charted it21wider than 818 of 974 titles; 13 others reached exactly as many
Weeks on any chart6longer than 642 of 974 titles
Best position reached1number one somewhere — so were 304 of 974 titles

“Number one on Netflix” is not the rare part. 304 of 974 titles — 31% — have been number one in some country in some week, and 65 of those 304 were number one in the only country that ever charted them. Read a rank next to the reach, not on its own. The full distribution, and what it can and cannot say.

What to watch after Dream

We are not recommending anything. We have no idea what you like, and Netflix publishes nothing about who watched what. What we can tell you is which other Korean titles were on the same country’s top 10, in the same week as Dream — the list you saw it on. That is a fact about a published chart, and it is the whole of what we are claiming.

TitleCountry-weeks shared
King the Land38
The Uncanny Counter27
D.P.23
See You in My 19th Life10
Celebrity9
Behind Your Touch5
Unstoppable5
Mask Girl4
Blade of the Immortal3
Peninsula3
Rebound3

Dream shared a country’s weekly top 10 with 26 other Korean titles across 158 country-weeks in total. The table shows the 11 it sat beside most often, and only those with a page here.

A big number here mostly means the title lasted. A show that held a country’s top 10 for a year sits beside almost everything; a show that charted for one week in one country can sit beside at most nine other titles ever. It does not mean the same people watched both, and it does not mean the two are similar. How we counted this, across every title.

Where these numbers come from, and what they cannot answer

Every Korean title that has charted · Looking for one particular week? · How far a company's catalogue travels · How we count