‘Squid Game,’ ‘Hellbound,’ and BTS are among the top hitmakers in Korean entertainment in 2021, along with their career outlook.

From the dramas ‘Squid Game’ and ‘Hellbound,’ to the supergroup BTS,’ South Korean pop culture garnered admirers from all over the world in 2021, generating anticipation for what the year ahead holds.
As per Yonhap News Agency, the dystopian Korean drama series ‘Squid Game’ has become the most-watched Netflix movie of all time, with more than 1.65 billion hours of viewing in the first four weeks after its September debut.
Contestants compete in lethal Korean children’s playground activities for a chance to earn 45.6 billion won ($38.5 million) in prize money in this nine-part series.
The show’s popularity made its outfits, which included green tracksuits and black masks, a worldwide fashion smash for Halloween last month. Videos of people enjoying children’s games included in the series have been rapidly spreading on TikTok, a short video social media network mainly used by teenagers.
One day after its release last month, Netflix’s ‘Hellbound,’ a new South Korean fantasy horror series, overtook ‘Squid Game’ as the most-watched TV show on the platform.
BTS’s record-breaking success in the K-pop industry continued this year, as its second English-language hit, ‘Butter,’ spent 10 non-consecutive weeks on the ‘Billboard Hot 100.’
The South Korean boy band followed it up with two more chart-topping singles, ‘Permission to Dance’ and ‘My Universe,’ a collaboration with Coldplay from the United Kingdom.
BTS made history by becoming the first Asian act to win Artiste of the Year at the American Music Awards (AMAs) earlier this month. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the K-pop superstar performed four sold-out concerts at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles between November 27 and December 1, attracting over 200,000 American fans.
According to experts, these remarkable successes once again shown that Korean pop culture is firmly anchored in the global entertainment business, which has been dominated by the United States for nearly a century.
Other K-pop groups, such as BLACKPINK, TWICE, Seventeen, Enhyphen, ITZY, NCT 127, Tomorrow X Together, and Monsta X, have a total of 13 albums on the Billboard 200 main albums chart, with some reaching high rankings this year, according to Kim, whose achievements show a fundamental shift in the West’s perception of South Korean culture in recent years.
“Westerners clearly had misconceptions or prejudices regarding Asians, and they used to consume foreign content because of this. They believed that foreign content is entertaining, but it is also strange or eccentric “He used Psy’s worldwide smash ‘Gangnam Style’ from 2012 as an example.
However, in the last three to four years, things have altered to the point that K-pop idol groups are now seen as a new standard of aesthetics or modernism, he noted.