For years, Netflix’s semiannual viewership reports followed a predictable pattern. Since 2023, no film or series had crossed more than 165 million views within a six-month window — impressive numbers, but nothing seismic. Then KPop Demon Hunters arrived.
In the second half of 2025, KPop Demon Hunters rewrote Netflix’s record books. The animated film amassed 481.6 million views worldwide between July and December, making it the most-watched title — film or series — in any six-month period in the platform’s history.
It wasn’t just a breakout. It was a complete outlier.
Netflix calculates views by dividing total hours watched by a title’s runtime, and even by that conservative metric, KPop Demon Hunters stands alone. All figures cited come from Netflix’s first-party data unless otherwise noted.
To understand the scale, consider this: KPop Demon Hunters outperformed the combined totals of the previous three films that topped Netflix’s semiannual charts.
Back in Action recorded 164.7 million views in the first half of 2025, Carry-On pulled 137.3 million views in the second half of 2024, and Damsel reached 143.8 million views in early 2024. Together, those three films total 445.8 million views — still 35.8 million fewer than KPop Demon Hunters achieved on its own in six months.
The gap only widens further down the list. The second most-watched movie from July to December, Happy Gilmore 2, drew less than one-third of KPop Demon Hunters’ audience. The distance between those two titles is roughly the same as the gap between Happy Gilmore 2 and the No. 29 film on Netflix’s chart, Paw Patrol: The Movie, which logged 37.9 million views.
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The film’s dominance has extended well beyond its initial release window. Since premiering on June 20 — and including the first 18 days of 2026 — KPop Demon Hunters has now surpassed 540 million views worldwide and shows little sign of slowing. It has spent 31 weeks on Netflix’s global Top 10 movie chart. In the United States, it also posted a 26-week run on Nielsen’s streaming Top 10, ending the week of December 15.
While KPop Demon Hunters defined Netflix’s film slate, the platform’s series rankings told their own story. Season two of Wednesday outperformed the conclusion of Stranger Things during the same July–December period, largely due to timing. Wednesday, which debuted in early August, accumulated 123.5 million views by year’s end, compared with 93.5 million views for Stranger Things 5, which premiered on November 26.
The end of Stranger Things also sparked a surge in catalogue viewing. All four previous seasons landed among Netflix’s 15 most-watched series in the second half of 2025, pulling in a combined 186 million views — nearly four times their total from the first half of the year.
At a platform level, Netflix reported that viewers streamed 96 billion hours of content between July and December, a 2 percent increase from the same period in 2024 and a 1 percent rise from the first half of 2025. Subscriber numbers grew by approximately 8 percent year-on-year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025.
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In its quarterly earnings report, Netflix noted that engagement for its original titles rose by around 9 percent compared with the previous year. That growth was partially offset, however, “by a year-over-year decline in viewing of non-branded view hours” — licensed films and series rather than originals. “This decrease primarily reflected a lower volume of licensed, second-run content across most regions following an elevated period of licensing during 2023-2024 as a result of the WGA strike.”
