The Great Flood: Korea Panned It, the World Watched

Scene from the Netflix film The Great Flood showing a flooded apartment complex

Daehongsu (대홍수), released globally by Netflix on December 19, 2025 under the English title The Great Flood, became the most-watched Korean film in Netflix's history within weeks of its release. It also picked up some of the harshest domestic reviews of any major Korean release that year. Both things are true at once, and Korean entertainment coverage has spent months trying to explain the gap — through the director's own theory, a media critic's theory about how Korean audiences review things online, and a hard look at what the record-breaking numbers actually measure.

Production Facts

Item	Detail
Korean title / romanization	대홍수 (Daehongsu), literally "Great Flood"
Director / writer	Kim Byung-woo (co-written with Han Ji-su)
Cast	Kim Da-mi (An-na, an AI researcher), Park Hae-soo
Runtime	108 minutes
Premiere	September 18, 2025, Busan International Film Festival (Korean Cinema Today section)
Global release	December 19, 2025, Netflix
Genre	Disaster film that shifts into an AI/time-loop science-fiction narrative in its second half

What the Title Actually Means

Daehongsu (大洪水) breaks down straightforwardly: dae (大, "great") plus hongsu (洪水, "flood" or "deluge"). In an interview with the Hankook Ilbo, director Kim Byung-woo said he chose the title deliberately for its biblical association — typing "daehongsu" into Google, he noted, immediately surfaces results about Noah and the Genesis flood narrative, and he wanted that association to be automatic for Korean viewers before they saw a single frame. He described the film as sharing a structural core with the ark story: a reset of the world, followed by survivors rebuilding it. That framing matters for how the film's back half plays, since the flood itself is largely resolved by the midpoint, and the story pivots into the AI/evolution material that split audiences.

How Netflix "Views" Are Actually Counted

Much of the coverage of The Great Flood's success cites a "views" figure that isn't self-explanatory if you're used to Korean box office reporting. Netflix's own Tudum Top 10 site defines a "view" as total hours watched divided by the title's runtime — so one view is not one person finishing the movie once; it's the equivalent of one full watch-through, aggregated across everyone who watched any portion of it. That is a fundamentally different unit than KOFIC's domestic admissions count (표 관객수), which Korean theatrical releases are judged by, and it's worth knowing before treating "27.9 million views in week one" as "27.9 million people watched this movie." According to Korean reporting on the Tudum figures, that opening-week number was more than double the previous opening-week record for a Netflix original Korean film, a mark previously held by Ma Dong-seok's The Wilderness. The distinction matters for comparing Netflix figures across countries, too: a "view" weighs a five-minute abandoned attempt and a full 108-minute watch differently only insofar as they add up to the same total hours, which is why a title can rack up enormous view counts even amid reports of viewers giving up partway through.

The Records It Set

Per OSEN's report via Nate, citing FlixPatrol data, The Great Flood held the number-one spot on Netflix's overall global film chart — English and non-English combined — for eight consecutive days after its release, a first for a Korean film. MBC News reported that its second week actually topped its first: 33.1 million views, versus 27.9 million in week one, with the film ranking number one in 53 countries and appearing in the top 10 in 92 countries total. By January 7, 2026, a Daum entertainment report tracking Netflix's own all-time non-English film rankings placed The Great Flood at number seven — behind titles like Troll (103 million all-time views) and Under Paris (102.3 million), but ahead of any other Korean film ever to chart there.

A Reception Gap With Two Competing Explanations

The domestic numbers tell a different story. According to a Nate News report from December 30, 2025, Watcha Pedia's audience score sat at 1.9 out of 5 based on more than 16,000 ratings, while Naver Movie's audience score was 4.13 out of 10 — both among the lowest of any major release that year. A later Nate report on January 18, 2026 put the film's IMDb score at 5.4 out of 10 and its Rotten Tomatoes freshness rating at 54%, showing the international critical reaction was mixed rather than glowing, even as the viewership numbers kept climbing.

Korean coverage offers at least two distinct explanations for why a film so many people watched scored so poorly with reviewers. Director Kim Byung-woo, asked directly about his global reception in an interview with Ilgan Sports, attributed it to universal emotional material — themes like a parent's bond with a child, he argued, land regardless of nationality, whereas Korean films built tightly around specific modern Korean history sometimes struggle to translate abroad. Separately, the January 18 Nate report floated an industry theory: that the very Korean-ness of the film's central image — a flood disaster unfolding inside a Korean apartment complex, a setting so mundane to domestic audiences that it barely registers as distinctive — read as a genuinely novel backdrop to international viewers unfamiliar with the aesthetic of Korean apartment blocks.

A third explanation, raised in a Nate News piece from January 2, 2026, is more about domestic online culture than about the film itself: critic Kim Kyung-soo, author of a book on Korean internet meme history, argued that harshly panning a widely-watched but divisive film has become its own kind of participatory sport on Korean rating platforms since the 2010s — sometimes described online as "byeoljeom terror" (별점 테러, literally "star-rating terror," a term for coordinated, deliberately brutal one-star reviews). Kim connected this to the broader "platform-ization" of review culture, where apps modeled on food-delivery rating systems reward short, quotable, maximally negative takes over measured ones. That dynamic doesn't explain the film's global viewership, but it offers a specifically Korean media-culture lens on why its domestic score cratered as hard as it did, even among people who watched the whole thing.

FAQ

Is The Great Flood connected to director Kim Byung-woo's other 2025 project?
Kim also directed Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint the same year. In interviews, he has described feeling he needed to keep experimenting with different approaches given the state of the Korean film market, rather than repeating a formula.

Where did The Great Flood premiere before Netflix?
It had its world premiere at the Busan International Film Festival in September 2025, in the Korean Cinema Today - Special Premiere section, roughly three months before its global Netflix release.

Verified as of September 18, 2026. Viewership and ranking figures reflect Netflix's official Tudum reporting at the dates cited; Netflix's all-time rankings continue to shift as new titles are released, so The Great Flood's exact position may have changed since the sources below were published.