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Squid Game Will Be Back For Season 2, Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk Confirms Plans

Published

3 years ago

November 9, 2021

Squid Game will be back for round two.

The show’s creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk, confirmed the plans for a second season of the South Korean survival drama in a recent interview with the Associated Press.

“So there’s been so much pressure, so much demand and so much love for a second season,” he told the AP in Korean, per a translation from Forbes. “So I almost feel like you leave us no choice! But I will say there will indeed be a second season. 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.”

“So I will promise you this…,” the writer and director continued, before switching to English and referencing his main character, Seong Gi-hun, played by Lee Jung-jae.

“Gi-hun will come back, and he will do something for the world,” Hwang said.

Squid Game S1

Squid Game follows a group of 456 people facing massive debts who willingly compete in a series of seemingly simple children’s games in an attempt to win a $40 million cash prize. The only catch is that if they lose, they die.

Within 17 days of being released, the gory thriller became Netflix’s biggest ever series at launch — beating even Bridgerton — and the first to surpass 100 million viewers when it premiered, the streaming service revealed last month.

Hwang previously opened up to Variety about the difficult process of writing the show, and whether or not he would make a second season given the first one’s success.

“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. But I wanted it to use the kind of characters we’ve all met in real life,” he said. “As a survival game, it is entertainment and human drama. The games portrayed are extremely simple and easy to understand. That allows viewers to focus on the characters, rather than being distracted by trying to interpret the rules.”

Hwang added that writing Squid Game “was harder than normal” for him because it is a TV series rather than a film.

“It took me six months to write and rewrite the first two episodes,” he said. “Then I consulted verbally with friends, and picked up clues for improvements through my own pitching and from their responses.”

He also said that he would approach a second season differently from the first.

“I don’t have well-developed plans for Squid Game 2,” Hwang said in September. “It is quite tiring just thinking about it. But if I were to do it, I would certainly not do it alone. I’d consider using a writers’ room and would want multiple experienced directors.”

Season 1 of Squid Game is available to stream on Netflix.

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