Squid Game season 2 was watched 68 million times in the first four days after it launched on Netflix, the streaming service says.
This sets a new Netflix record for viewership in a premiere week, beating the 50.1 million views that Wednesday accrued when it was launched in 2022.
The second season of the Korean-language series Squid Game — which sees hundreds of cash-strapped individuals compete in deadly games for a life-changing sum of money — was released on the streamer on December 26.
The new entry welcomes the return of Lee Jung-jae as Seong Gi-hun/Player 456, who seeks to infiltrate the games and put an end to it once and for all.
The first season, which was released in 2021, also broke Netflix records. It has so far been viewed 265.2 views, making it the streamer’s most popular non-English language TV show.
Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has already teased a potential release date for the hit Netflix thriller’s third and final season.
Speaking in a new interview with Variety, Hwang said: “At this point, anything I might say is going to be a spoiler, so I want to be cautious. But what I can say is, after Season 2 launches, I believe we will be announcing the launch date for Season 3 soon. I probably expect that to launch around summer or fall next year.”
*Warning — Spoilers ahead for the ‘Squid Game’ season two finale ahead*
He explained that he had originally planned on writing the second season story across a span of about eight to nine episodes, but “once I finished the story, it came to over 10 episodes, which I thought was too long to contain in a single season.”
“So I wanted to have an adequate point where I could give closure as a second season and then move on with the third,” he continued.
Going on to speak about all of the obstacles the series’ star Gi-hun/Player 456 faced, Hwang said all of his failures led to a heavy climax — the death of his best friend Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), at the hands of The Front Man (Lee Byung-hun).
“And when you think about Gi-hun’s journey, I thought that that was an adequate moment to put a stop and give him a little bit of closure along that long story arc,” Hwang added, revealing that the third season will pick up with Gi-hun “having that sense of huge guilt and sense of failure weighing heavily on him.”
