SEOUL — The third and closing season of Netflix’s “Squid Game” broke viewership information on the streaming platform following its launch on June 27, marking a becoming shut for what has arguably been essentially the most profitable South Korean TV sequence in historical past.
Though critiques have been combined, Season 3 recorded greater than 60 million views within the first three days and topped leaderboards in all 93 nations, making it Netflix’s largest launch thus far.
“Squid Game” has been transformative for South Korea, with a lot of the home response targeted not on plot however on the status it has dropped at the nation. In Seoul, followers celebrated with a parade to commemorate the present’s finish, shutting down main roads to make approach for a marching band and parade floats of characters from the present.
In a single part of the procession, a phalanx of the present’s masked guards, dressed of their trademark pink uniforms, carried neon-lit variations of the coffins that seem on the present to hold away the losers of the survival sport. They had been joined by actors enjoying the contestants, who lurched alongside sporting expressions of exaggerated horror, as if the merciless stakes of the sport had simply been revealed to them.
On the fan occasion that capped off the night, sequence creator Hwang Dong-hyuk thanked the present’s viewers and shared the bittersweetness of all of it being over.
“I gave my everything to this project, so the thought of it all ending does make me a bit sad,” he mentioned. “But at the same time, I lived with such a heavy weight on my shoulders for so long that it feels freeing to put that all down.”
Regardless of the in a single day international fame “Squid Game” introduced him (it’s Netflix’s most-watched sequence of all time), Hwang has spoken extensively concerning the bodily and psychological toil of making the present.
Guests take pictures close to a mannequin of the doll named “Younghee” that’s featured in Netflix’s sequence “Squid Game,” displayed on the Olympic park in Seoul in October 2021.
(Lee Jin-man / Related Press)
He unsuccessfully shopped the present round for a decade till Netflix picked up the primary season in 2019, paying the director simply “enough to put food on the table” — whereas claiming the entire present’s mental property rights. Throughout manufacturing for the primary season, which was launched in 2021, Hwang misplaced a number of tooth from stress.
A gateway into Korean content material for a lot of around the globe, “Squid Game” present served to highlight beforehand lesser-known features of South Korean tradition, bringing innovations like dalgona espresso — made with a standard Korean sweet that was featured within the present — to locations comparable to Los Angeles and New York.
The present additionally cleared a path for the worldwide success of different South Korean sequence, accelerating a golden age of “Hallyu” (the Korean wave) that has boosted tourism and exports of meals and cosmetics, in addition to worldwide curiosity in studying Korean.
However alongside its worldly successes, the present additionally provoked conversations about socioeconomic inequality in South Korean society, such because the prevalence of debt, which looms within the backstories of a number of characters.
Just a few years in the past, President Lee Jae-myung, a longtime proponent of debt aid, mentioned, “‘Squid Game’ reveals the grim realities of our society. A playground in which participants stake their lives in order to pay off their debt is more than competition — it is an arena in which you are fighting to survive.”
In 2022, the present made historical past as the primary non-English-language TV sequence and the primary Korean sequence to win a Display screen Actors Guild Award, taking house three in complete. It additionally received six Emmy Awards. That very same 12 months, town of L.A. designated Sept. 17 — the sequence’ launch date — as “Squid Game Day.“
Although Hwang has said in media interviews that he is done with the “Squid Game” franchise, the Season 3 finale — which options Cate Blanchett in a cameo as a recruiter for the video games which might be the present’s namesake — has revived rumors that filmmaker David Fincher might choose it up for an English-language spinoff sooner or later.
Whereas saying he had initially written a extra standard completely happy ending, Hwang has described “Squid Game’s” closing season as a sobering final stroke to its unsparing portrait of cutthroat capitalism.
“I wanted to focus in Season 3 on how in this world, where incessant greed is always fueled, it’s like a jungle — the strong eating the weak, where people climb higher by stepping on other people’s heads,” he instructed The Instances’ Michael Ordoña final month.
“Coming into Season 3, because the economic system has failed us, politics have failed us, it seems like we have no hope,” he added. “What hope do we have as a human race when we can no longer control our own greed? I wanted to explore that. And in particular, I wanted to [pose] that question to myself.”
