What you need to know
- The person behind Squid Game only has three pages of notes for the show's second season.
- The first season of Squid Game was a huge hit.
- Oh how Netflix could use the subscriber boost of a new season of one of its popular shows.
As much as we're all looking forward to the arrival of the second season of Squid Game, it doesn't sound like we will be watching it any time soon. But thankfully, that isn't because Netflix has canceled it.
That's the good news, but not a given at this point. Netflix has been canceling projects left and right since it was announced that it lost 200,000 subscribers last quarter. But even if Netflix wanted to put Squid Game back onto our screens to help drive subscriber growth — as it so desperately needs — it can't do it for a while yet. That's because its creator is nowhere near being ready. In fact, Hwang Dong-hyuk "only has about three pages" of ideas written down so far — nowhere near enough to get the show's second season underway, let alone onto Netflix's servers.
The show's director and writer was speaking with Vanity Fair about how the second season could play out and whether we should expect big changes in the second season. The conversation also gets into why it took so long for Squid Game to be made in the first place.
They told him no one would watch. In 2009, director Hwang Dong-hyuk tried writing what would become Squid Game as a feature film. It was a time of global financial crisis. Hwang himself was in debt, as were his mother and grandmother. But for all his efforts, he couldn't secure financing for a movie about hundreds of desperate individuals competing to the death in children's games for a large cash prize. "People were telling me that it's too unrealistic," Hwang says. It was too absurd, they said—and far too violent—so he put his script away. A decade passed, during which Hwang directed three acclaimed films: The Crucible, Miss Granny, and The Fortress. But he didn't forget Squid Game, and in 2018, he found himself revisiting the old script.
That, and much more, makes for a great read in the original Vanity Fair article. But it all just serves to add to the disappointment that we won't see the show back on our screens until late 2023 and potentially 2024 at the earliest.
If at this point you're still to watch the first season, now is a very good time to fix that!
Netflix, Disney+, and other streaming services including Apple TV+ can all be watched on just about anything. But to do it in style, be sure to check out our list of the best Apple TV deals on the market today.
100% exclusive content for the price of a cup of coffee.
With TV+, you can watch well-produced, big-budget TV shows from famed directors, and starring award-winning actors and actresses across all your Apple devices and with up to six members of your Family Sharing group.
