How Netflix made us fall in love with K-dramas

What do you get if you take a bunch of ripped, shirtless male K-pop idols in boxing gloves and have them spar in the ring until they’re sweating? For Netflix: another global hit.

The streamer’s K-drama Bloodhounds, now in its second season, is currently tearing up its global viewing charts. Season 2 attracted 7.4 million views last week, making it the most-watched non-English TV show worldwide on the service, and the third-most-popular show overall.

Bloodhounds is no exception for Netflix. Last week, three of the 10 most-watched non-English-language shows on the service were Korean. The week before that, it was four out of 10, and the week before that, three. And Netflix’s three most-watched TV show seasons of all time, in any language? All Korean.

Those three seasons are seasons 1–3 of Squid Game. The life-or-death competition drama broke audience records when it first debuted in 2021, racking up 1.65 billion viewing hours in its first four weeks. “It was probably the biggest show in the history of television,” as Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos claimed in 2022. Since its launch, total Squid Game viewing has surpassed 4.5 billion hours.

But here’s the thing about Squid Game: Despite its unrivaled success, it has only been responsible for a small percentage of the overall viewing of Korean content on Netflix, with viewers around the world wholeheartedly embracing the country’s storytelling. From 2023 to 2025, Netflix subscribers have streamed more than 51 billion hours of Korean movies and TV shows, according to Netflix data that I recently analyzed for a new special Lowpass report.

From little pockets of interest to a global phenomenon

Netflix’s success with Korean dramas didn’t come out of thin air, as Sarandos himself acknowledged in 2021. “It’s not like we had to go in and teach anyone in South Korea how to make great content,” he told Netflix investors that year. “It’s an incredible market for that. And there’s always been curiosity around the world. The K-drama market has always had little pockets of success all over the place.”

That includes the United States, where services like DramaFever, Viki, and KDrama tried to bring Korean storytelling to Western audiences long before Squid Game became a breakout success for Netflix. DramaFever executives in particular quickly realized that there were untapped audiences for Korean content in the United States. “We [catered] predominantly to Midwestern middle-aged women, as well as Latin teenagers,” says DramaFever cofounder Hyun Park.

DramaFever and other niche services specializing in Korean entertainment also benefited from Hollywood’s blind spots: As the major studios bet on ever-bigger franchises with massive budgets and recognizable stars, Korean shows and movies were largely ignored. That brought down licensing costs, and made it possible for these services to buy the overseas rights to Korean TV shows and movies at a bargain.

However, DramaFever ultimately was too early. The service reportedly amassed just above 400,000 paying subscribers — not enough for Warner Bros., which shuttered DramaFever in 2018, just two years after acquiring it from Softbank.

One of DramaFever’s challenges was that it tried to build an audience for unfamiliar shows from scratch. Netflix, on the other hand, has a built-in audience, a massive dubbing operation, and recommendation algorithms that help viewers worldwide discover titles they might like — whether that’s an action-packed, dystopian show like Squid Game, a heartwarming drama like Extraordinary Attorney Woo, or a high school zombie thriller like All of Us Are Dead.

What unites many of these shows and films, aside from big budgets and sleek productions, are the big, emotionally charged storylines around friendship, love, and loss. At the same time, Squid Game takes on late-stage capitalism, a cop show like Stranger explores the impotence of the separation of state powers, and the thriller The Glory seeks accountability for bullying and emotional abuse — all things that speak to a universal desire to right wrongs.

In addition to audience and algorithms, Netflix also has deep pockets, and has been willing to spend heavily on things that work, even if they go counter to traditional Hollywood ideas about the importance of Western stars and directors. Netflix committed to investing $500 million into Korean content in 2021. By 2023, Netflix pledged to spend another $2.5 billion on Korean movies and TV shows. Further investments could come as early as this year.

Will all this success ruin K-dramas?

Netflix’s Korea strategy also benefitted from a few other trends: The covid-19 pandemic not only supercharged the transition to streaming, but also led Hollywood studios to halt the productions of many popular shows — and with it, viewers eager to find something new.

All that coincided with a growing interest in K-beauty and K-pop, which contributed to a virtuous cycle: Many Korean pop stars moonlight as actors, and their music becomes quite literally the inspiration for new movies and TV shows. Case in point: KPop Demon Hunters, which is now the most-streamed movie of all time on Netflix. And yes, it’s made in the US, but its story is bound to get more people interested in Korean entertainment.

The K-drama streaming boom has not been without downsides. Some critics fear that the global success of Korean dramas will lead the country’s film industry to water down its products, and for instance give up on exploring issues around class disparities that many of today’s K-dramas touch on. Here’s how Georgetown University assistant professor Jinaeng Choi put it in an interview last month:

“When the spotlight gets this bright, the production logic can shift: bigger budgets, tighter schedules, higher expectations, more stakeholders. And when risk starts to look expensive, projects can drift toward what’s already proven — familiar beats, familiar casting, familiar pacing. The concern you hear is whether you end up with a handful of reliable templates, while the weirder, sharper, less algorithm-friendly stories have a harder time getting made.”

There are also concerns that the global K-drama boom may shift the focus of Korea’s entertainment industry toward international audiences to make up for a struggling local market. South Korean box office sales fell 16 percent through the first 11 months of 2025. And while theaters have rebounded from the pandemic in many European markets, and reached 80 percent of their 2019 totals in the US last year, Korean ticket sales are still around half of what they were before the pandemic.

Park believes that one of the issues plaguing the country’s film and TV industry is its short-term thinking that prevents them from building lasting franchises. “Korean companies have been bad at keeping IP and retaining IP,” he says. “We give our IP to whoever pays for it, do one season of our story, and move on to the next one. I think that has destroyed our market.” Instead of building long-term franchises, Korean studios have traditionally treated shows as short-term projects, and sold all rights to local broadcasters. Streamers like Netflix, which likes to acquire global rights for its projects, could make this trend even worse, he worries.

But there’s a caveat. “My disclaimer is: Thanks to Netflix, Korean content is here,” Park says.

This goes both ways: Thanks to the success it has seen with Korean content, Netflix also feels emboldened to invest more in other markets that haven’t traditionally been seen as promising hunting grounds for global TV hits. The company is now producing originals in 50 countries and making significant investments in markets like Japan and India.

Or, as Sarandos put it, speaking about the success of Squid Game in 2021: “It’s proving that great storytelling from anywhere in the world can entertain the world.”

For more data and insights on Netflix’s success with Korean dramas, check out my free report: The K-Flix Phenomenon.