This month, we continue with our examination of the Netflix Engagement Reports. This sixth report covers on the second half of 2025. Where possible, its format is the same as the preceding report, so what follows is a comparable analysis of engagement with Korean series and films on the platform. That piece concluded with the observation that it would be interesting to see the actual data on the performance of KPop Demon Hunters over the second half of 2025, for comparison with the word-of-mouth buzz that then surrounded it. Now the time has come, and there is a big question mark over how we should actually deal with it.
As the original motivation for this series was an interest in engagement with Korean language media, the criterion for classification as a ‘Korean’ title has been based on primary original language. For a project entitled Visualising the Korean Wave to consider KPop Demon Hunters not to be a part of the phenomenon on arbitrary linguistic grounds, though, seems churlish at best. Rather than come to any kind of principled or definitive conclusion about this now, for the time being we instead provide alternative visualisations to accommodate differences in the interpretation of the film’s position. Those in which it is classified as a ‘Korean’ title arguably fit the remit of Visualising the Korean Wave better, while those that classify it as ‘Other’ or ‘English’ are arguably more closely comparable with the pieces on prior reports and their implicit focus on language. We return to this point for further discussion in the conclusion.
For now, Korean series titles on Netflix do not present the same problem as films. Of the 7745 series titles with over 100,000 viewing hours on Netflix between July and December 2025 that made the cut for inclusion in the report, 595 (just over 7.5%) were Korean. Together, they racked up a grand total of 8,476,400,000 viewing hours, representing a noticeable decrease in terms of raw numbers for Korean series viewing hours compared with the first half of 2025. In total 1,210,400,000 hours less Korean content was viewed in the second half of 2025 than the first. This gives further weight to the theory advanced in the last report that the spike in viewing was due to the release of the concluding series of Squid Game. Despite this apparent decline, we note that this number of viewing hours in broadly in line with the reports from 2024, even representing a slight increase in viewing hours compared to the second half of that year.
Of the total number of shows available on the platform, 248 Korean titles were among the 2,996 series made available globally (i.e., just over 8% of global releases). The total combined number of viewing hours for these global releases was 6,338,300,000 for a decrease in viewing hours of 889,000,000 compared with the first half of 2025.
Looking across at the top ten series titles with global release across the platform, two were Korean: Bon Appétit, Your Majesty (or 폭군의 셰프) in third position and the third season of Squid Game, very slightly lower down the list at number five. The former is an historical fantasy romance, while the latter is a high-concept action thriller. The thematic and stylistic gulf between these titles serves to demonstrate that engagement with Korean series on Netflix is not restricted to a particular genre. While we continue to use the metric of hours viewed, for now, as we have done since our first attempt at looking at Neflix’s Engagement Reports, it is worth mentioning that the order and rank of these series among all globally relesed series titles is very different when considering Netflix’s metric of views, that is hours viewed divided by run time. Despite being viewed for over 100,000,000 more hours, 588,300,000 as a opposed to Squid Game season three’s 484,300,000, clocking in at more than double the run time Bon Appétit, Your Majesty was only placed at number 17 for views with 37,500,000 in comparison to Squid Game’s 79,000,000 views, which would make it the fourth most viewed series of the second half of 2025 by that metric.
Further down the list, a total of 21 Korean titles appeared in the top 100 global releases, and 152 in the top 1,000, meaning that the Korean offering continues to be disproportionately well represented among the most watched titles to feature in the report at roughly the same rate as observed in every viewer report released to date in both the top 100 and the top 1,000. In the graph below, you can see the distribution of the titles in the top 1,000 arranged in descending order of hours viewed with the Korean titles highlighted in purple. This graph is interactive. Mousing over the bar brings up a tool-tip showing rank, hours viewed, title, and whether the language was Korean or not. Individual categories can be highlighted by double clicking on the legend to the right of the plot.
Turning to the languages represented in the top 100 globally distributed series, the below visualisation breaks them down by original language. The relative size of the boxes represents the number of viewing hours for each title over the first half of 2025 and you can see the title and number of viewing hours if you mouse over each box. You can also click on each language for a zoomed in view.
Of the 8723 film titles with over 100,000 viewing hours on Netflix between July and December 2025 that made the cut for inclusion in the report, 382 (just over 4%) were Korean. Together, they racked up a grand total of 529,000,000 viewing hours. Of those, a mere 48 were among the 2000 titles made available globally (2.4% of those titles), watched for a total of 404,500,000 hours. The difference in availability of series and films as a proportion of globally available content remains striking.
At this point, I would typically point out the disproportionate lack of Engagement with Korean cinema in comparison to Korean series. While this certainly seems to be the case based on the foregoing, let’s see how different that paragraph looks, but this time including KPop Demon Hunters among the Korean films.
Of the 8723 film titles with over 100,000 viewing hours on Netflix between July and December 2025 that made the cut for inclusion in the report, 383 (just under 4%) could be classified as pertaining to the K-Wave. Together, they racked up a grand total of 1,331,600,000 viewing hours. Of those, a mere 49 were among the 2000 titles made available globally (very slightly over 2.4% of those titles), watched for a total of 1,207,100,000 hours. The difference in the figures reported in this paragraph is striking. KPop Demon Hunters alone was accrued just over one and a half time the total number of viewing hours that all other Korean films did, or just under twice as many viewing hours as all globally released K-Wave related films.
While Korean cinema may not receive the same level of engagement as series titles, this report may reflect its growing mass appeal. Looking again just at those titles made available globally. Other than KPop Demon Hunters, there is a Korean film in the top ten films with the most hours viewed, namely, The Great Flood (or 대홍수) at number ten. Further down the list, a total of 4 Korean titles appeared in the top 100 and 40 titles appeared in the top 1,000, making the appearance of Korean films in these sections of the list very slightly better represented than their proportional appearance among the entire set of film titles released globally over this period.
Even when KPop Demon Hunters is included in the tally of Korean films, the difference between the reception of Korean films and series can be clearly seen by comparing the graphs below with the bar chart above. Immediately below, we see the distribution of the film titles in the top 1000 arranged in descending order of hours viewed with the Korean-language titles highlighted in purple. Like the above graph for series, it is interactive
The graph below is otherwise identical to the preceding graph, but for completeness’ sake classifies KPop Demon Hunters alongside Korean language films as a K-Wave film.
Turning to the languages represented in the top 100 globally distributed films, the below visualisation breaks them down by primary original language with similar interactivity to the one for series found above. Where they appear in both visualisations, languages are represented by the same colours.
Finally, we repeat the above visualisation, but this time classify KPop Demon Hunters alongside films with Korean as their primary original language.
From a high-level, aggregated perspective perspective, we see quite an increase in engagement with Korean-language films on Netflix in comparison to the first half of 2025 while engagement with series remains at roughly the same, albeit very high, level as most earlier reports. It seems entirely reasonable to attribute the dip in viewing hours after the first half of 2025 not to a decline in the level of general sustained interest in Korean series, but rather the return to the status quo following the hype around season three of Squid Game. This, taken along with the runaway success of KPop Demon Hunters on the platform is highly suggestive of the continued health of the K-Wave. Indeed, it could even be characterised as expanding on the platform, or perhaps it is simply being reflected across the two categories of media to feature in the Netflix Engagement Reports.
The inclusion of KPop Demon Hunters among ‘Korean’ films is an analytical imposition that bears some examination. Relying on primary original language, as we have done so far in this series, has sometimes obscured as much as it has revealed. It is also an implicit endorsement of a monolingual ideology. In reality, many of the films included here should properly be regarded as multilingual, so straddle, overlap, or otherwise confound the categories by which we classify here. For example, Fall for Me is a German-Turkish co-production, which makes use of both languages as integral parts of the dialogue rather than, for example, just briefly or cosmetically, for example, as scene setting or incidental characterisation. To take another, the animated film Wish Dragon was produced with both Chinese and English language versions, released in that order. There is no easy solution for cases such as this. Rather, it is mentioned just to highlight the impossibility of removing all judgement calls from the description of data and, looking especially at how the classification of KPop Demon Hunters inflated ‘Korean’ films’ viewing hours, how these judgements can affect analysis.
The rupture between the K-Wave and the Korean language represented by KPop Demon Hunters is notable, but not the first time that such disjuncture has appeared in this series. Previously, we have examined the flow of Korean films, dramas, and pop music through the global mediascape and considered the extent to which the physical location of Korean-identifying people contributes to this. To stick with the idiom of global cultural flows, KPop Demon Hunters represents various elements of Korean culture, i.e., the K-Pop industry, folklore, foodways, etc., moving unbound through the global ideoscape. Here, the metaphor of the K-Wave fails us somewhat. The ‘wave’ connotes a point of origin, implicitly Korea, and movement away from that point. As we see pop-cultural products that are clearly to be understood as part of the K-Wave with geographical origins that are far removed from this, the substance of the K-Wave is problematised. Whether the ‘K-’ of the K-Wave is, in fact, an initialism for ‘Korea’ or something else entirely is a longstanding (Lie 2012) and on-going (Lee 2026 and papers therein) discussion. How to talk about or classify KPop Demon Hunters is simply a high-profile example of this, which itself is just an instantiation of the issues inherent in trying to make an infinitely rich reality tractable with with our poor, abstract concepts (hat-tip to Franco Moretti and apologies for butchering his wonderful phrasing).
The only question that remains, then, is what we are going to do about the much anticipated spin-off Squid Game: America (updates and speculation here and here) when it finally arrives? For now, we will continue to monitor the Netflix Engagement Reports as they are released and cross that bridge when we come to it.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean
Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean
Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies
(AKS-2021-OLU-2250004)