Netflix’s Korean Content Blasts Past 4BN Views, Powered By ‘The Great Flood’ & ‘Squid Game’

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix‘s Korean content craze has helped the streamer to more than four billion views, with demand going far deeper than Squid Game.

A Deadline analysis can reveal that Korean-language titles across film and TV have amassed at least 4.5BN streams since Netflix first started publishing views in What We Watched reports from July 2023.

Unsurprisingly, Squid Game has led the charge, with two new seasons dropping over the past two-and-a-half years, cementing its status as a true phenomenon on Netflix. Other notable titles include disaster movie The Great Flood, which has become a breakout hit since debuting last month.

Season 2 of the Squid Game franchise has recorded 220.9M streams since its premiere in December 2024, making it the most-watched TV show on Netflix during that time.

Squid Game Season 3 has delivered 150M views since June last year, making it the third highest-rated show on Netflix. Even Season 1, which premiered in 2021, has 97M views in the past couple of years.

Put together, all three seasons account for nearly half-a-billion views, but other titles have also struck a chord with Netflix’s 300M-plus subscribers, even if they had not had the same attention.

King the Land, a romantic drama series about the heir of a luxury hotel group thrown into an inheritance war, was the next biggest Korean series on Netflix after Squid Game.

Featuring K-pop stars Lee Jun-ho and Lim Yoon, the 2023 series originally screened on Korean network JTBC, but has since checked in 64.7M views for Netflix.

This put it in the top 100 series on Netflix over the past two-and-a-half years, placing it ahead of splashy English-language originals like the final season of The Crown and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.

Other hit Korean series include True Beauty (47M streams), My Demon (45.8M), and Queen of Tears (44.6M), all of which featured in Netflix’s top 150 shows. Below is the top 10 Korean series.

Netflix committed to investing $2.5BN in Korean originals in 2023 — and the strategy is delivering results. When Life Gives You Tangerines and The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call, which both premiered in the first quarter of 2025, were among the top 10. The Trauma Code has reportedly been renewed for two more seasons.

One original series that is confirmed to return is All of Us Are Dead, which has registered 31.5M views since July 2023, an impressive return given it originally premiered in January 2022.

Over in movies, the top Korean title was 2024’s Badland Hunters, an original Netflix production about a group of Seoul earthquake survivors in an orderless wasteland. Badland Hunters has recorded 73.9M views since its debut, putting it 108th Netflix’s top films since mid-2023, when it began publishing What We Watched reports in their current form.

The next biggest Korean film was The Great Flood, another Netflix original, which has made waves with 66.1M views after only being released on December 19. Set on the last day of Earth, it tells the story of a desperate fight to save a child from an apartment after a great flood has swept the planet. Below is the top 10 Korean films.

Netflix is planning to launch well over 30 Korean originals in 2026, with K-content chief Don Kang saying that more than 210 Korean titles have been ranked in the global top ten over the past five years.