Squid Game, the new South Korean survival drama series streaming on Netflix, has officially become the platform’s biggest launch ever, the streaming giant announced on Wednesday.
The series, which premiered on Netflix on September 17, has “officially reached 111 million fans” in less than a month.
The nine-part series is an imaginative, unorthodox story in which 456 contestants risk their lives in a mysterious survival game for a chance to win 45.6 billion won.
Driven to “desperation” and gathered at an unknown location, all the participants play one game each day as they race towards the prize money. “The price of failure is death, and only one contestant can survive to claim the prize,” according to the Netflix synopsis. The series eventually reveals how this diverse group of people ended up there, and who the mastermind is behind the games.
Squid Game is written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, the maker of The Fortress, Miss Granny, and Silenced. Dong-hyuk first conceived the series as a film and began writing it in 2008, right after his debut. “That was a time when I frequented comic book stores. As I was reading a lot of comic books, I thought about creating something like a comic book story in Korea,” he said.
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On September 27, following the release of the series, Netflix’s co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos had said that Squid Game would be the streamer’s “biggest non-English language show in the world, for sure.”
Speaking at the Code Conference in Los Angeles, Sarandos added that the series also had a “very good chance” of becoming Netflix’s biggest show ever.
However, Sarandos had not provided any data to support his claims about Squid Game at the time.