Green light!
Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk seems to have gotten a jump on Netflix's PR team, telling Associated Press Monday that his Korean-language original-series sensation has been re-upped for a second season.
“There’s been so much pressure, so much demand and so much love for a second season. So I almost feel like you leave us no choice!” Hwang said from the red carpet of an Los Angeles screening of Squid Game. “But I will say there will indeed be a second season. It’s in my head right now. I’m in the planning process currently.”
Netflix said Squid Game had the platform's biggest debut ever, with 142 million Netflix accounts tuning in for at least two minutes of the nine-episode series in its first 28 days on the platform. The series is the only subscription streaming show tracked by Nielsen this year that has surpassed 3 billion weekly viewing minutes.
Beyond merely producing big viewership numbers for Netflix, Squid Game has validated the global streaming company's strategy of dispersing development resources and freeing them to create series and movies with local talent and in local languages. The Spanish production Money Heist had already proven out this strategy's merit to an extent, but Squid Game firmly re-enforced the notion that it works.
Squid Game follows a down-on-his luck, divorced Korean dad (played by Korean actor Lee Jung-jae), who stumbles into a kind of reality competition show in which the winner of simple children's games receive big cash prizes ... and the losers are "eliminated" in violent, often gruesome ways.
