Netflix viewership may be down significantly from last year overall, but its local language productions have been humming along nicely, particularly since the Writers Guild of America strike started in May, and the streaming service started more aggressively surfacing international programming options for viewers in its largest market, the U.S.
Once again, Next TV compared viewing time for Netflix’s top local-language programming since June 1 to the same period of 2022. We found viewership of the platform’s top non-English TV series titles soared by 30% year over year in the past seven weeks. For foreign-language films, the increase in total hours viewed was around 20%.
Even more compelling is the fact that Netflix’s international series now account for over 43% of the total viewing hours for all of the streamer’s series.
Last year, during the same period, that share was only 20%.
Following the watershed success of Korean dystopian sci-fi series Squid Game in the fall of 2021, Netflix started spending slightly less in the U.S. on original production and more making shows in places like South Korea.
Netflix, for example, is now throwing around $2.5 billion a year at the Korean film and TV production industry, a fivefold increase over what it spent in 2016.
Netflix hasn't come close to generating the kind of viewership had by Squid Game, its most watched program of any kind ever. But as Netflix's well of English-language movie and TV show hits has run a little dry lately, a number of performances by local-language shows have stood out.
Season one of Spanish-language melodrama The Surrogacy, shot in Mexico and generating over 80 million viewing hours from June 19-25, nearly beat out the first full week on the platform for highly anticipated Chris Hemsworth action sequel Extraction 2.
In early June, the debut of Colombian romantic thriller Fake Profile generated over 76 million viewing hours, nearly usurping the second-week performance of Arnold Schwarzenegger series FUBAR.
And the week before last, Korean romcom series King the Land generated 65.1 million viewing hours, beating every other show on Netflix.
A number of Netflix’s non-English hits have been enduring, too. Since its drop on the platform last October, season three of the Mexican crime-themed telenovela La Reina del Sur has spent 17 weeks in Netflix’s top 10 non-English TV titles rankings, for example.
“The dynamic that Netflix has proven out that nobody else has ever proven out is that it’s not just possible, but almost equally as likely that if you make a great show anywhere in the world it could break out all over the world,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told investors in December.
“So we’re strengthening both our ability to create global content, but even better doing it from just about anywhere,” Sarandos added. “And I think having that emphasis on the local market helps us tremendously, and then being able to pick those projects that are global.”
