Competition series Squid Game: The Challenge has debuted on Netflix. Based on the hit drama from 2021, it sees 456 players enter and try to win $4.56 million. Five episodes are available Nov. 22. Four more come out Nov. 29, and the season finale premieres Dec. 6.
The streaming home to the hit survival drama announced Squid Game: The Challenge, with 456 players in real-life competition in a series of games for a record-setting $4.56 million purse.
It’s official: Netflix has renewed its biggest series, Squid Game, for a second season. The follow-up had been in development, and Netflix brass — as well as the series’ writer, director and executive producer Hwang Dong-hyuk and main cast — had teased a return of the show following the runaway success of the initial installment.
It’s officially a green light: Squid Game, Netflix’s breakout hit of 2021, will be getting a Season 2, Ted Sarandos, co-CEO and chief content officer, affirmed Thursday. On Netflix’s fourth quarter 2021 earnings Q&A, Sarandos was asked whether there would be a second season of the violent South Korean survival drama, which has scored as the company’s No. 1 most-viewed TV series. v“Absolutely,” Sarandos replied. “The Squid Game universe has just begun.”
Exclusives
Squid Game remained the dominant force in U.S. streaming from October 4 to 10, according to Nielsen, once again racking up more than 3 billion minutes of viewing. The Korean drama, Netflix’s top all-time original with viewing by 142 million global households according to the company, attracted 3.26 billion viewing hours in its previous week. That made it just the sixth title to clear the 3 billion mark since Nielsen began tracking streaming in 2020. The most recent week saw a slight dip to 3.02 billion, but the show’s hold was impressive.
Though Netflix’s most popular (OK, “sampled”) original series has yet to be renewed for any additional season, the nine-episode Korean thriller will compete as a drama series, and not as a limited series, at upcoming awards shows (including next fall’s Emmys). It thus will throw in against the anticipated likes of Succession, Better Call Saul‘s final season, The White Lotus and the farewell season of This Is Us.
Netflix’s Squid Game utterly dominated Nielsen’s latest U.S. streaming ranking, and it did so by joining the elite “3 Billion Club” — as in, total minutes viewed during the week-long evaluation period.
For the Week of Sept. 20, the Netflix megahit amassed 1.9 billion minutes viewed across its nine episodes, easily besting all other original streaming series.
The global success of Netflix’s Korean drama Squid Game illustrates the growing strength of non-English-language programming worldwide.
The Korean-language limited series, which had Netflix’s biggest first-28-day premiere ever, drew only 206 million viewing minutes during its first week on the platform.
The dystopian-themed Korean hit surpasses Extraction as the streaming platform’s most initially viewed show.
Backing Netflix executives’ projections that Squid Game would be its biggest global TV series ever, TV analytics company TVision says the South Korean dystopian drama pulled in a massive 11% of all streaming time spent by U.S. viewers this past weekend.
