Season 2 of Squid Game continues its brutal satire of cruelty and capitalism. Meanwhile, Netflix is making millions from advertising partnerships…
In 2009, South Korean filmmaker Hwang Dong-hyuk sat in a cafe and began thinking about comic books and capitalism. The financial crisis had left the 30-something Hwang and his family on the brink of poverty; a film he’d been working on had fallen apart, while his mother had recently retired from her office job, meaning another stream of income had suddenly dried up.
It was around this time that, as Hwang later told The Guardian, he sat in a Seoul manga cafe and read the Japanese comic, Battle Royale. Set in the near future, it’s a brutal story about high school children fighting to the death on a remote island; as he read it, Hwang began to wonder: “If there was a survival game like [this] in reality, would I join it to make money for my family?”
From that seed came Squid Game, the brutal dystopian TV series which first streamed on Netflix in September 2021. In it, 456 contestants are sent to a remote island and coaxed into participating in a string of children’s playground games – all in the hope of winning some $31m in cash. The twist being that only one person can take home the money; the rest will all die horribly, one by one, in the attempt.
The story is largely told from the perspective of Seong Gi-hun, (Lee Jung-jae), a working class divorcee who, like all the other participants in Squid Game, is hopelessly in debt. Hwang’s dystopian thriller is a distinctly unsubtle allegory for late capitalism, presenting the struggles of the 99 percent as a grim fight for survival orchestrated by the obscenely rich.
It’s difficult to overstate just how successful Squid Game has been for Netflix. One of the platform’s most-watched shows around the globe, its first series reportedly generated profits of around £650m. The show was also, given its ambition and production values, made for a relative pittance – each of its nine episodes cost around £1.75m each, meaning the first season as a whole was made for a total of about £15.5m. By contrast, the starry action comedy Red Notice, which also streamed in 2021, cost Netflix something like £161m.
Read more: Squid Game season 2 episode 1 review | The games never end
But where Red Notice dwindled from view almost as soon as it was uploaded to the platform, Squid Game’s mix of violence, pitch black comedy and striking visuals made it one of Netflix’s few offerings to actually make a mark on the wider public consciousness. As a result, a quirky, subtitled (or dubbed) show from South Korea joined Stranger Things and Bridgerton as the streaming giant’s all-time biggest hits. It’s now as much a part of Netflix’s DNA as Mickey Mouse is a part of Disney’s.
All of which explains why, in the run up to the second season’s debut in December 2024, Squid Game has been just about inescapable. By now, you can buy Squid Game action figures of varying kinds. There’s a Squid Game mobile app. In New York, Sydney and Madrid, there are Squid Game: The Experience installations, where visitors can participate in the show’s assorted challenges.
Each episode of Squid Game season two is prefaced by adverts promoting Netflix’s corporate tie-up with takeaway delivery service, Just Eat. As part of the new series, the latter’s selling a range of meals themed after the show’s ideas – there’s an ‘Elimination Burger’ and ‘Masked Man Waffle Fries’, for example. “Indulge in crispy, golden fried chicken with a spicy Korean twist, inspired by the intense drama and thrills of the hit series,” Just Eat’s website reads. The implication being that Just Eat expects its customers to sit on their sofas, eating burgers and fries while watching people summarily executed.
There’s an irony in a show about capitalism’s all-consuming, corrupting power being co-opted to sell action figures and fast food, but then, this is hardly a new phenomenon. In the 1990s, the slogan ‘Girl power’ was appropriated and used to sell everything from pop music to lipstick. RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven’s satire of 80s America, was turned into toys, videogames and a kid-friendly animated series.
What is a little unusual about Squid Game is how unabashed its creator has been about his reasons for making a second season. The stress of writing and directing the first series was so great that Hwang initially resisted Netflix’s request that he return to make another. In 2021, he described the process as “physically, mentally and emotionally draining” – such that several of his teeth dropped out – and said he wanted to make an unrelated film instead.
Hwang was soon talked into making two further seasons of Squid Game, however, and for one key reason. “Money,” he told the BBC, reportedly ‘without hesitation. “Even though the first series was such a huge global success, honestly I didn’t make much. So doing the second series will help compensate me for the success of the first one too.”
In writing Squid Game season two, Hwang seems to have put some of his own experience into its story and the progress of its protagonist, Gi-hun. Having survived the trauma of the first games, he resolves to use his newfound wealth to track down the faceless billionaires who bankroll them. But before long, fate conspires to drag Gi-hun back to the island and compete once again. Like his creator, Gi-hun is hooked back into a dreadful experience he could have easily walked away from.
What looks at first glance like a fairly straight re-tread of the first season is soon revealed to be, if anything, even more despairing. In it, Hwang adds more examples of late capitalist societal quirks, including memecoin pedlars and fresh-faced YouTubers – both of whom represent dreams of passive income and financial security, but whose paths more commonly end in burnout or empty bank accounts. Season two also adds a voting system in which contestants can end the games early; as in real life, these end up dividing the dwindling ranks of players into two angrily opposed groups who argue bitterly while their wealthy captors look on.
By now, Gi-hun is visibly older and more care-worn; another reflection of Hwang himself, if last year’s interviews are anything to go by. “I’m so exhausted,” he told Variety during season two’s shoot. “I’m so tired. I have to say, I’m so sick of Squid Game. I’m so sick of my life making something, promoting something.”
While Hwang was busily working on Squid Game season two in 2023, Netflix rushed out a game show spin-off, Squid Game: The Challenge, in which real-world contestants competed in the same playground pursuits as the original series. Nobody died, obviously, but the spectacle was, if anything, even more grotesque: we were watching ordinary people climbing over one another for money.
The spin-off show was a hit for Netflix – so much so that a second series is in development. Amazon has also evidently taken note, since in December – cheekily close to the launch of Squid Game season two – it launched its own expensive reality gameshow, Beast Games. Fronted by gurning YouTube celebrity MrBeast (real name: Jimmy Donaldson), it sees a legion of contestants (1,000 of them, to be precise) demean themselves in the hopes of winning $5m in cash. Like Squid Game: The Challenge before it, Beast Games has been slapped with allegations of ill-treatment and talk of lawsuits. (MrBeast himself has said those allegations are ‘blown out of proportion.’)
In that Seoul manga cafe over 15 years ago, Hwang Dong-hyuk hit on an idea that resonates with audiences all over the world. The timing may have been key: the post-pandemic era was one in which the planet’s billionaires expanded their wealth at an unfathomable rate, even as the wider economy reeled from months of inactivity.
The major thing Hwang didn’t include, when he dreamed up Squid Game, was the economic element of the games themselves. In his fictional world, the games take place in secret, seemingly orchestrated solely for the amusement of a small clique of the unfeasibly wealthy.
In reality, the world’s richest one percent would probably take the concept, sanitise it for television, and then watch as the billions in revenue rolled in. As Squid Game: The Challenge, Beast Games and The Traitors have proved, there’s money to be made from gameshows that poke at the darker side of the human condition.
Meanwhile, as Hwang works on what will become the third (and reportedly final) season of Squid Game, due out this year, Netflix and its corporate business partners continue to wilfully ignore its bleak allegory. And why wouldn’t they? For them, the meaning of Squid Game is irrelevant; it’s now another franchise, with recognisable symbols, characters and designs which can be taken and moulded into assorted money-making stuff.
In a final twist of irony, the business practices Netflix has patented in recent years can be thanked, in no small part, for the existence of Squid Game's second and third seasons. As superbly laid out in journalist Will Tavlin’s feature about the streaming giant, entitled Casual Viewing, Netflix has created a new media landscape. Where writers, actors and other people working in TV and film might once have received residuals for years after their work was originally made – from syndicated re-runs, DVD sales and the like – the makers of Netflix’s output get nothing. It’s a new business model that can also be applied to Netflix’s streaming rivals, and means that the working lives of all but the most established filmmakers and stars are suddenly far more precarious than they were just a few years ago.
To quote Tavlin’s article: “Without residuals, small jobs that used to generate reliable income for years became worthless. Some actors learned they were making thirty times less than they would have on a network show.”
As we’ve already seen, Hwang fell foul of Netflix’s business model. He was paid a relatively small initial fee to make Squid Game season one, and didn’t see a penny from its reported £650m profits. With no residuals to fall back on, Hwang was instead compelled to hop back on the treadmill and create two further seasons.
It’s a stark example of what happens when a single entity gains a huge amount of power and wealth. And how they will then use that power to rewrite the rules of the game, allowing them to increase their own profits while workers fight over the crumbs left behind. It’s a scenario we can see play out across entire industries – and in society as a whole.
Viewed like this, it’s little wonder that Hwang’s pessimistic series has hit such a nerve with viewers. As he once observed in an interview, “We are living in a Squid Game world.”
Squid Game season two is streaming now on Netflix.
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