The popularity of K-dramas have grown rapidly in the past few years, so it’s clear why all streaming platforms are pushing for more Korean drama content, and the year 2022 was no exception. “Korean content is being watched so heavily in India,” says Netflix India’s Vice President, Monika Shergill, as she looks back on the “terrific 2022” the streamer had, where it saw the release of K-dramas like Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Twenty-Five Twenty-One, Business Proposal and Thirty-Nine.
Apart from Korean content, South films are slowly becoming the first choice of OTT viewers across the country. “In fact, I can safely tell you that for a lot of the South films, there is a lot of viewing that is beginning to happen in Hindi across the titles,” says Shergill, who exclusively reveals to us that Kantara Hindi, which dropped on Netflix India on December 9, 2022, is still trending on the global Top 10 for non-English films and has been watched for more than 4 million hours within the two weeks of its release. Notably, it featured on the top spot on the first week of its release.
Shergill says the one thing which the team of Netflix takes very seriously as a service is to make content travel from anywhere to everywhere. “That’s the only important thing for Netflix because that’s how we we believe that we are taking stories across cultures and countries and getting recognition for creators. Just like Korean content becoming popular across the world, Indian stories must also be watched very heavily in India and go across the world.”
From a heartland thriller fronted by an ensemble cast in Khakee: The Bihar Chapter to returning of fan-favourites– Delhi Crime 2, Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives 2, Mismatched 2, Jamtara 2, and unconventional stories of domestic abuse and human greed in Darlings and Monoca, O My Darling, Netflix India set a new benchmark for creating the original Hindi content with some of the most unforgettable viewing experiences in 2022.
“2022 has been a very defining year for us in terms of the way we rolled out our slate all the fan favorites coming back in terms of season two’s and doing so well, our films doing so well,” says Shergill. “With the price recalibration, and such a big slate coming, actually we didn’t announce our slate at the beginning of the year and it was a very intentional thing. We didn’t want to because there was a lot of announcement happening everywhere and we knew that we were delivering this late and we were not announcing for the next two years, we knew the massive number of titles that we were bringing this year and each title would perform at its peak due to the creative excellence and quality and the must-watch story that they were. So I guess looking across, it’s been a defining year for us in terms of growth momentum, I would say we have actually turbocharged a lot of the growth and just overall from touching new audiences point of view and even the kind of license cinema that we brought onto the service.”
Shergill continues, “Like in December 2020, we started with Sooryavanshi and Aranyak which is winning awards everywhere. Then from RRR and Gangubai Kathiawadi to Laal Singh Chaddha and Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2, all these films and so many others have really done well on Netflix and are cinema that we have taken to the world.”
So, what does Netflix have in store for 2023? “There’s very high viewing for English content and then there are both Korean and Spanish that work. South is really doing well. Even in 2022, we all saw how it picked up pan India. We have a very good South license slate this year across Tamil, Telugu and some Malayalam also. We have titles like Rana Naidu. It’s the first time ever pairing of Rana Daggubati and Daggubati Venkatesh. They are headlining the series which is in Hindi but will also be available in Telugu. Then we have Abhishek Chaubey’s crime drama ‘Soup’ which is also based in South and is a very interesting story again. So we have a lot of titles where we are trying to do this pan India kind of storytelling with cast with where the stories are based. And we have a very good license slate,” Shergill concludes.
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