Disney paid attention to Squid Game. Amazon? Not so much.

Netflix released its Q2 2025 earnings report this afternoon, with one notable Squid Game update: The third season of the show has attracted 122 million views to date, including 72 million within its first four days.

In late June, I wrote about how the global success of Squid Game has helped to supercharge South Korean content on Netflix and elsewhere: Netflix subscribers watched more than four billion hours of South Korean movies and TV shows in the second half of 2024 alone, according to data I was able to gather from the streamer’s own viewership numbers.

That bump wasn’t just caused by Squid Game, as the first two seasons of the show accounted for less than 20% of those four billion hours.

Since then, I’ve gotten some additional data from Justwatch that shows how much the Squid Game effect reverberated across much (but not all) of the streaming world. Netflix already had a lot of Korean originals even before it launched Squid Game, and has steadily grown the number of titles since.

Others played catch-up: Both Disney+ and Apple TV+ began to significantly grow their Korean content slate around the time Squid Game debuted.

Disney in particular has leaned in heavily, growing its share of Korean content from basically zero to more than four percent of its overall catalog. Only Amazon appears to have completely shrugged off the trend, basically keeping its share of Korean content stable.

The total number of Korean movies and TV shows on streaming platforms has grown by around 70% since the debut of Squid Game, according to Justwatch.

A version of this article was first published as part of Lowpass, a weekly newsletter about AR, VR, streaming and more. Sign up now for free.

Korean flag photo by jieun kim on Unsplash