David Fincher is reportedly making a Squid Game spin-off series for Netflix. But wouldn’t we rather see something original from the filmmaker?
From a comparatively small investment, Squid Game has become a huge money-spinner for Netflix. The streaming giant bankrolled South Korean writer Hwang Dong-hyuk’s dystopian TV game show concept when other studios wouldn’t, with the series eventually appearing on the platform in 2021. The budget for the series was a reported $21.4m; the show was such a hit with subscribers that it was said to have made something in the region of $900m for Netflix.
With numbers like that swirling around, it’s little surprise that Netflix wants more Squid Game. Series two is due to stream in December, while a third and final season will follow in 2025; to keep the show’s name at the front of subscribers’ minds, reality TV spin-off Squid Game: The Challenge streamed in 2023.
Meanwhile, rumours have been going around for over a year that director David Fincher is somehow involved in an English-language remake of the bloodthirsty satire. At first, it was rumoured that there were plans to adapt the series into a film; more recently, it’s been said that Fincher’s heading up a TV series instead, and that it’ll be a spin-off rather than a remake. The title floating around at the moment is Squid Game: America.
World Of Reel has persistently reported on Fincher’s connection to a Squid Game series for months now, and now Deadline has published a story which appears to back it up. According to the latter outlet’s sources, Fincher will be devoting much of next year (that’s 2025) to making his Squid Game series, with a script by British writer Dennis Kelly.
For now, little’s known about the project – though unless Fincher and Kelly go wildly off-piste, the format’s already been set by its original creator. Hundreds of down-on-their-luck contestants are hooked into appearing on a murderous show in which they play demeaning playground games in the vain hope of winning a life-changing sum of money. Only one of them can win the cash; the rest will die horribly.
As Deadline points out, Fincher’s 1997 thriller The Game was also about a shadowy organisation playing potentially deadly games with an unsuspecting contestant. Though in that film’s case, the contestant was an insanely rich banker (Michael Douglas’ Nick Van Orton) learning to be less cynical and selfish, Scrooge-style. It’s possible that Fincher rather likes the chance of making a series that inverts that film’s themes, given that Squid Game is about the ravages of late capitalism on the penniless and vulnerable.
Fincher certainly has form when it comes to continuing the themes and tone of a movie in a TV series. His 2017 show Mindhunter, a period drama about criminal profiling at the FBI, was of a piece with his 2007 opus, Zodiac. He’s also good at remakes: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was tense and visually sumptuous.
Still, this writer can’t help but feel a faint pang of disappointment that Fincher could be about to spend a year working on a spin-off from someone else’s hit TV series. The filmmaker will no doubt bring all his precision to bear on the show, particularly if he’s directing some or even most of the episodes (Fincher was showrunner on Netflix’s House Of Cards, but only directed two instalments out of 73; he directed seven of Mindhunter’s 19 episodes).
All the same, Fincher’s arguably at his best when he’s working on original, standalone material. His films – Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network and Gone Girl among them – each has its own texture and exists in its own world unconnected to franchises or cinematic universes. Whether they’re based on a novel (Fight Club, Gone Girl), a thriller set in the scuzziest city imaginable (Seven) or a drama in a preppy university (The Social Network), Fincher’s films are embossed with his personal style and worldview.
Squid Game, meanwhile, is already studded with ideas and imagery that has become immediately recognisable to the show’s millions of watchers: the armies of guards with their eerie, faceless masks. The killer doll with the laser eyes. The identical green tracksuits. The MC Escher-like staircases. To at least some degree, Fincher will have to engage with that imagery and play in someone else’s creative sandpit.
In its report, Deadline suggests that Fincher could “squeeze in a movie” next year before he embarks on his Squid Game series. If the stories are accurate, that movie could be Bitterroot, a crime western written by Michael Gilio, which is also rumoured to be going into production in 2025.
It’s possible, then, that Fincher has some kind of ‘one for me, one for you’ deal in place with Netflix. The streaming giant bankrolled his $25m passion project, Mank, in 2020 – a monochrome biopic about Citizen Kane screenwriter, Herman J Mankiewitz. It earned critical adulation and award nominations, but was hardly the kind of film that could attract millions of new subscribers. Fincher followed Mank with The Killer in 2023 – a return to more mainstream thriller territory.
With Netflix taking a slightly more cautious approach to its output under the aegis of new film boss Dan Lin, it’s not hard to imagine the company asking Fincher to lend his talents to a sure-fire ratings success like Squid Game before he makes Bitterroot. The latter’s about a 78 year-old, deathly ill war veteran in pursuit of the scammers who stole his life’s savings – arguably a more sombre, riskier proposition than something familiar to audiences like Squid Game.
Again, Fincher will almost certainly make something hugely watchable out of his Squid Game series; he’s possibly even relishing the chance to make it. But if I were able to choose between a spin-off from an existing TV series or an original thriller from Fincher, it’s the latter I’d go for every time.
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