Squid Game will have a second season, confirmed director Hwang Dong-hyuk. “It’s in my head right now. I’m in the planning process currently. But I do think it’s too early to say when and how that’s going to happen,” he told the Associated Press.
While Netflix has not announced a second season for its biggest title ever, Hwang said at a red carpet celebration for the show on Monday, “I almost feel like you leave us no choice. There’s been so much pressure, so much demand and so much love for a second season. So I will promise you this, Gi-hun will be back and he’ll do something for the world.”
Squid Game 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,” as per Netflix. All participants play one game each day as they race towards the prize, and the price of failure is death. It is written and directed by Hwang, who has films like Miss Granny (remade in Telugu as Oh Baby! with Samantha Akkineni) to his credit.
The show amassed over 142 million household views in the first four weeks since its release on September 17, with the majority of views coming from outside its home market. It also ranked as the streamer’s top program in 94 countries, including the US.
Hwang first conceived Squid Game 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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However, he shelved the idea and continued work on his other projects, as it seemed “unfamiliar and violent” then. “There were people who thought it was a little too complex and not commercial. I wasn’t able to get enough investment and casting was not easy,” he added.
The series examines human nature and how we change from childhood to adulthood by showing adults revisiting and playing children’s games. Hwang said, “I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society, something that depicts an extreme competition, somewhat like the extreme competition of life.”
The cast of Squid Game comprises actors Lee Jung-jae, Park Hae-soo, Oh Young-soo, Wi Ha-Jun, Jung Ho-yeon, Heo Sung-tae, Anupam Tripathi, and Kim Joo-ryoung, among others.