Warning: This story contains spoilers for Squid Game season two.
The game is still afoot as Squid Game heads into its third and final season.
Unlike the dystopian South Korean drama's first…
When we first meet Squid Game protagonist Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) in Season 1, he doesn’t have enough money to buy his daughter fried chicken for her birthday. This lack of means, made more extreme by his crippling debt, informs Gi-hun’s decision to take part in the Squid Game—even after he discovers its deadly stakes. When Gi-hun emerges as the gauntlet’s only survivor, he takes home 45.6 billion won.
Watching Korean deadly competition drama Squid Game as an American can turn into an exercise in pausing high-stakes action in order to Google the won to USD exchange rate. (At the time of this writing, it’s $1 is to roughly 1,447 won.) The series communicates that 45.6 billion won is a life-changing amount of money for the Korean contestants. But what exactly does that mean in tangible terms?
Ahead of Squid Game Season 2, out on Dec. 26, let’s break down what the prize is really worth, in a 2024 context.
In December 2024, at the time of writing this article, the 45.6 billion won prize pot equated to roughly $31.5 million. Notably, the Korean won is at a 15-year low in relation to the U.S. dollar.
The prize pot is the same for the game in Season 2 as it was for the game in Season 1, even though it has been three years in both our world and the world of the show, and the Korean cost of living has increased. In 2021, the 45.6 billion won prize money would have been closer to $38.5 million when converted to USD. Apparently, the people who run the game care neither about the vagaries of global currencies, nor inflation.
How much would 45.6 billion won mean to a “normal” person in Korea? Well, the average monthly salary in Korea is 3.9 million won, or around $2,696. This amounts to 46.8 million won per year (around $32,347) before income tax. With his winnings, Gi-hun could pay the annual average salaries for roughly 974 Korean workers.
Half of the country’s population lives in the Seoul metropolitan area, which was ranked as the ninth most expensive city for expats in a 2024 survey. When it comes to the Seoul rental market, it costs around $475 per month for a studio apartment outside of the city center or around $2,500 per month for a three-bedroom apartment in the city center.
From a U.S. perspective, that monthly rent might seem very cheap, but it’s important to factor in the unique rental payment structure, known as jeonse, commonly used in Korea. The system involves the tenant putting down a large sum of “key money” when leasing an apartment that will be returned at the end of the usually two-year lease period. The “key money” is usually anywhere between 50% to 70% of the property’s value, making it difficult or impossible for many Koreans to break into the rental market. In November 2023, the mean jeonse cost was 423 million won, or roughly $292,000. After winning the game, Gi-hun would have no trouble renting; he could afford to pay the mean jeonse cost for roughly 108 apartments.
Of course, with the game’s 45.6 billion won prize, Gi-hun could afford to buy something in Seoul’s property market—which is almost completely inaccessible to the average Korean. A state-issued study released in 2023 determined that a Seoul resident would have to not spend a single dime of their income for 15.2 years to buy a home in the city. The average apartment in Seoul’s richest neighborhood, Gangnam (made famous in Psy’s 2012 satirical banger “Gangnam Style”), sells for 2.25 billion won, roughly $1.56 million.
As for fried chicken? Gi-hun could now afford to buy his daughter more than 1.8 million of the 25,000-won tongdak signatures at this August Chicken branch near Seoul’s Yaksu station. Unfortunately, she moved to Los Angeles with her mother and stepfather in Season 1.
In Episode 1 of Season 2, “The Search,” Gi-hun casually offers his network of gangsters a 500 million won bonus for finding Gong Yoo’s The Recruiter somewhere in the Seoul subway system. The men are highly motivated by that amount of money, which equates to about $346,000.
Here are a few final metrics, which feel relevant in the context of Squid Game’s depiction of the absurdity of wealth accumulation under capitalism: Jeff Bezos makes $1.9 million per hour, which equates to about 2.75 billion won, or roughly $45.8 million in a 24-hour period—so, he makes more in one of his days than Gi-hun made winning the whole game.
In 2024, Elon Musk passed Bezos to become the wealthiest person on the planet; his net worth recently reached over $400 billion, spurred by Donald Trump’s re-election. Gi-hun would have to win the game over 12,700 times to accumulate that much money.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for Squid Game
When a second season of Squid Game was greenlit following the massive success of the first, it was unclear whether the story warranted an extension. Writer-director Hwang Dong-yuk, previously best known for feature film work like 2017 period war epic The Fortress, had not planned on continuing it. And so much of the first season relied on the novel horror of watching the barbaric, exploitative Squid Game play out, hoping that protagonist Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) could hold onto his humanity in the face of it all. Could a second season really recapture the visceral emotions provoked by that unpredictability?
Well, naysayers need not have feared. While Squid Game Season 2 contains some of the same story beats as the first season, this is a much different story that ends up in a much different place, driven by a protagonist who is much changed from the Gi-hun who played the Squid Game in Season 1. Let’s break down everything that happened in the violent, action-driven ending of Squid Game’s second season, and what it could mean for the upcoming Season 3.
Much of the dramatic tension in Squid Game Season 2 is driven by the addition of Hwang In-ho—aka the Front Man, aka Oh Young-il, aka Player 001—to the Squid Game as a contestant. While the Front Man is a previous winner of the game, by the time we meet him in Season 1, he is a higher-up within the game’s behind-the-scenes organization.
The Front Man’s Season 2 decision to join is motivated by Gi-hun’s own request to take part in the game. While Gi-hun’s involvement is presumably good for the game’s behind-the-scenes betting business (everyone likes a defending champion), he is also unpredictable. Unlike the other contestants, he has previous knowledge of the game and has different motivations. While others are in the game to win the money, Gi-hun is looking to take the whole operation down. The Front Man could try to control Gi-hun as a behind-the-scenes force, but he has much more agility to do so as a fellow competitor and eventual ally. As the season progresses, we see the Front Man slowly earn Gi-hun’s trust and then use that trust to manipulate him in subtle ways.
One of the most interesting changes to the rules of the competition in Season 2 of Squid Game is the vote players have after the completion of each round. If a majority of players vote to leave, then the game will end and the surviving players can split the prize money accumulated thus far.
The players vote to continue after the first two rounds, but the vote following the third round ends in a tie. In the season finale, the contestants are informed they will have another vote the following day to break the tie. The violence escalates: First, there is a guard-sanctioned bloodbath in the men’s bathroom that gives the “X”s a slight advantage in number. Then, once the dorm lights go out for the night, the “O”s attack the “X”s in an attempt to cull their numbers and ensure an “O” victory in the vote. For each person taken out in these “special games,” more money is added to the prize pot, further encouraging this behavior.
Most of the contestants in the Squid Game only see two options. They can either stay in the game and fight to survive and win more money, or leave with the money they’ve accumulated and live. Gi-hun, however, sees a third option. He wants to risk his life for the chance to take the game down. Gi-hun knows that, after some of the contestants have killed one another, the guards will eventually step in. He instructs his small band of fighters to avoid the fight, leaving their fellow “X”s to the slaughter, and instead use their energy to overpower the unsuspecting guards. They retrieve the guards’ weapons and make for the control room.
Was this effort doomed from the start? Not only do the guards outnumber the contestants, but the Front Man is a mole. Once the fight begins, he uses his influence to subtly maneuver the outcome (though, notably, does shoot and presumably kill some of his employees in the process). When Player 388 Kim Dae-ho (Kang Ha-neul), who claims to be a former Marine, freezes up in the fight and is unable to bring more ammo to the rebels, they are easily taken out one by one.
Gi-hun’s friend Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan) is the last to die in the failed rebellion, shot by the Front Man (donning his boss mask once again) right in front of Gi-hun. It’s a gut punch for both the viewer and Gi-hun. In many ways, Jung-bae is the Gi-hun of this season: a divorced father hoping to get his life back on track, but not willing to kill anyone for it. His death echoes thematically across the finale and presumably into the next season.
The Front Man knows just how devastating a blow this is for Gi-hun.While Gi-hun values all life, Jung-bae isn’t just another contestant; he is an old friend. They were on strike together years ago, a period that was a major turning point in Gi-hun’s life. In a conversation the Front Man overhears between Gi-hun and Jung-bae earlier in the season, we learn that Jung-bae was responsible for Gi-hun’s entry into betting on horse races. In that same scene, Jung-bae expresses regret for not being able to give Gi-hun money when he stopped by his pub, prior to the start of the Squid Game, in Season 1.
Gi-hun ends the season in utter despair. He has not only failed at both of his stated goals (to take down the game, and to get everyone out alive), he has lost an old friend—someone who trusted him with his life and who died because of it. Before they went into the fight, the Front Man asked Gi-hun: “Are you suggesting that we make a small sacrifice for the greater good?” When Gi-hun agrees, the Front Man smiles. For him, this is a happy ending.
In the season finale, the fishing captain that detective character Jun-ho (Wi Ha-jun) relies on in his search for the Squid Game island is revealed to be a spy. When one of Jun-ho’s hired muscle men catches the captain tampering with a search drone, the captain ruthlessly stabs him and pushes him overboard. Presumably, the captain is working for the people who run the game, and his “rescue” of Jun-ho three years prior was anything but a happy coincidence. Could he have been sent specifically by In-ho, aka the Front Man, to save the brother he shot from certain death?
So many people die, as is Squid Game’s way. Characters taken out in the bathroom fight include rapper Thanos (played by real-life rapper T.O.P.), sure to be a fan favorite if only as a rich source of Season 2 memes. Another rash of killings comes once the lights go out and the “O”s attack. This includes Player 380, Se-mi (Won Ji-an), who was reluctantly pulled into Thanos’ orbit. Though timid Player 125 Min-su (Lee David) tries to help her, Se-mi is killed by Player 124 Nam-gyu (Roh Jae-won).
We see Player 246, aka Gyeong-seok (Lee Jin-uk), shot by one of the guards when the rebellion fails. However, we also know that No-eul (Park Gyu-young), a North Korean defector who works as a guard, is sympathetic to his cause as the father of a sick girl. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gyeong-seok somehow makes it to Season 3.
The players left standing include: trans woman and impressive fighter Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon) and Dae-ho, who were back in the dorms when the guards took out the remaining rebels. Mother-son duo Geum-ja (Kang Ae-sim) and Yong-sik (Yang Dong-geun), pregnant contestant Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri) and her crypto YouTuber Myung-gi (Yim Si-wan). And of course Gi-hun and the Front Man.
Off of the island, Jun-ho is still searching for the Squid Game, unaware that the fishing captain he trusts is a mole. However, he still has good-natured gangster Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho) by his side.
Netflix has already filmed a Season 3 of Squid Game, with plans to release it in 2025.
The final scene in Season 2 Squid Game shows a group of contestants (including Players 100, 096, and 353) walking into a game, like the next round. While viewers may recognize the giant girl doll from the Mugunghwa (the Korean version of Red Light, Green Light) games in both Seasons 1 and 2, there is a second giant doll in the scene. Both dolls are modeled after characters from a classic Korean children’s education book series. Young-hee is the girl, and Cheol-su is the boy. What does the arrival of Cheol-su mean for the next game? It can’t be anything good.
In an early episode of Squid Game 2, the series’ working-class hero Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is summoned to a dance club on Halloween night. Weaving among revelers dressed as sexy nurses, cops, and skeletons, he eventually spots the masked figure he’s been pursuing, clad in the hot-pink tracksuit of a Squid Game guard. The scene may well be a nod on the part of creator Hwang Dong-hyuk to the ubiquity of Squid Game Halloween costumes in 2021, when the holiday fell roughly six weeks after Netflix’s Korean megahit debuted and quickly became the platform’s most-watched series of all time. Regardless of Hwang’s intentions, the immediate connection that fans will surely make between this moment and the show’s instant commodification speaks to how drastically the latter phenomenon has shifted its meaning.
Squid Game—you know, the blood-spattered thriller about how capitalism pits desperate people against one another in a battle royale for the entertainment of depraved elites—has been a brand for as long as it has been a global sensation. Viewers buy Squid Game merch, pay to participate in Squid Game simulations, and tune in to Squid Game spin-off reality competitions. When you consider that the show is a product of the world’s biggest streaming service, this trajectory is as predictable as it is ironic. But now, as the long-awaited second of three planned seasons premieres, it’s clear that the Squid Game-industrial complex has undermined Squid Game the work of political art, in ways both tangential to Hwang’s storytelling and intrinsic to it.
When we last saw Gi-hun, the guilt-ridden victor had been en route to the airport to reunite with his young daughter in the U.S. when he spotted Squid Game’s recruiter (Gong Yoo) approaching new victims in a subway station and realized he couldn’t just walk away with his 45.6 billion won. So much for a fresh start. In a brief intro to the Season 2 premiere, Gi-hun leaves the airport, vows to find Squid Game’s mysterious masterminds “no matter what it takes,” and cuts out the tracking device they inevitably implanted under his skin.
Two years later, he’s holed up in the seedy Seoul hotel that has become his personal fortress, still obsessed with taking down the monsters who made him rich. To that end, he’s paying a sketchy search party millions to scour the transit system for the White-Rabbit-esque recruiter. Meanwhile, police detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-jun) has recovered from an attempted murder at the hands of his older brother, In-ho (Lee Byung-hun). His Season 1 search for that sibling, who’d disappeared years earlier, led him to Squid Game island, where In-ho revealed to Jun-ho that he was the deadly playground-game tournament’s diabolical Front Man—and then shot Jun-ho after he refused to join In-ho in the annual slaughter of 455 unwitting debtors. Now a disillusioned traffic cop, Jun-ho gets drawn into Gi-hun’s unofficial investigation, which sends Gi-hun to the arena for Squid Game 2024 as Jun-ho and his motley team try to follow him and end the game forever. Like the castaways of Lost, they have to go back to the island.
It takes too long—two plodding episodes out of just seven this season—to get them there. As it stalls, the show unnecessarily reiterates Gi-hun’s broadsides against the bored billionaires for whom Squid Game is a spectator sport and burns time on characters who don’t end up being especially important. Once Gi-hun is back in his green tracksuit, we meet the new players who give the season its emotional stakes, but the plot feels too much like a rehash of Season 1: play, murder, rage, repeat. (In that sense, Squid Game 2 is extremely similar to another super-popular death-game sequel, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.) It’s pure fan service when the giant, creepy robot doll Young-hee returns for another round of Red Light, Green Light. Yes, there are new games, but their candy-colored, nursery-rhyme-soundtracked killing fields aren’t meaningfully different from the violent spectacles viewers saw last time. Once the games have begun, Jun-ho’s search for the island becomes an afterthought. And the finale’s cliffhanger ending is so abrupt, it leaves the disjointed season feeling frustratingly unfinished.
Not that Squid Game 2 is a total disappointment. It remains one of the most aesthetically distinctive and compellingly acted shows on TV; Lee Jung-jae’s international success, in particular, is worth celebrating. It’s nice to see more and better-developed female characters this season, from a pregnant player to a self-styled shaman. There’s a man (Yang Dong-geun) who’s surprised to find his mom (Kang Ae-sim) has entered the games in hopes of helping him pay off his crushing debts. (I couldn’t help but think of the beloved mother-son team from Squid Game: The Challenge.) The first guard we really get to know is a woman (Park Gyu-young), albeit one whose storyline never delivers on the promise of early episodes. An empathetically portrayed trans woman who also happens to be an army veteran makes a strong argument for LGBTQ people in the military (though that statement is somewhat undermined by the already-controversial choice to cast a cisgender male actor, Park Sung-hoo, in the role).
Thematically, a rule change that has the players voting after each game on whether to continue or stop and split the money they’ve earned so far develops ideas about the tyranny of the majority that the first season only suggested. Watching the uniformed masses lock in their often-suicidal choices, one by one, triggers the same trepidation as watching election results roll in. Yet these sequences, like each individual game, stretch on for too long. By the third round of voting, anxiety gives way to boredom. It takes almost the entire season to break through various forms of monotony, and when interesting stuff finally starts to happen, you get the sense that you’ve just spent seven hours watching what amounts to a supersize teaser for Season 3.
Squid Game the brand, which must supply content to satisfy customer demand, has superseded Squid Game the show, whose first season constituted a complete artistic statement. “I had no intention of doing a second season,” creator Hwang recently told Variety. But in another bitter irony, he’d previously explained that he’d only signed on to continue the series because he felt he’d been inadequately compensated for the debut season.“I’m so sick of Squid Game,” Hwang complained in the same Variety interview. “I’m so sick of my life making something, promoting something.” That exhaustion is palpable throughout Season 2.
There’s no separating this excess of narrative from the glut of Squid Game derivatives we’ve been sold over the past three years. Merch both official ($110 Young-hee necklace, anyone?) and unofficial has proliferated. Mattel, Crocs, Johnnie Walker, and many more jumped on the Season 2 brand-collab bandwagon. Netflix has invited fans to play non-lethal Squid Games, from The Challenge to immersive Squid Game: The Experience pop-ups on three continents, as though the point of the series was that macabre versions of childhood games are fun. King of YouTube MrBeast broke the internet with “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!” Then he parlayed that hit into the Prime Video contest Beast Games, which premiered just a week before Squid Game 2. In an unfortunate instance of life imitating art, the New York Times reported several cast members’ complaints of sleep deprivation, inadequate food, and even hospitalizations on the set of the off-brand competition.
The populist point of the original Squid Game was that we should resist the commodified and aestheticized violence inherent in a system that enriches a wealthy few while forcing the poor to fight each other for scraps. If anything, the bankability of Squid Game the brand—a category in which I’d include Squid Game 2—illustrates how thoroughly we’ve failed to absorb that lesson. What Squid Game does has drowned out what Squid Game says. And what began as a stark satire of greed, exploitation, and economic polarization has largely devolved into a cash-cow franchise like any other. It reminds me of something the Front Man tells Gi-hun in the new season: “The game will not end unless the world changes.” Will it ever?
It’s been three long years since Squid Game first premiered on Netflix to become the streamer’s most-watched TV series, ever. The Korean-language drama was an unexpected cultural phenomenon, drawing one in four Americans into its tale of deadly competition.
That being said, you would be forgiven for not remembering all of what happened in Season 1 ahead of the second season, which begins streaming on Dec. 26. For those who are a bit fuzzy on where we left protagonist Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), who the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) is, and the basic rules of the titular game, here is a recap with everything you need to know heading into Season 2.
While Squid Game is an ensemble drama, the story thus far has centered around Seong Gi-hun, aka Player 456. When we meet Gi-hun in Season 1, he is an affable deadbeat dad who has to borrow money from his elderly mom to take his daughter out for her birthday. While he struggles with a gambling addiction and the debt he has accumulated as a result, he is a good guy who tries his best to be there for his mom, daughter, and friends—but he often fails. When Gi-hun is approached by The Recruiter (The Trunk’s Gong Yoo) to take part in a game with the chance to win billions of won, he sees it as an opportunity to finally set his life right.
The Squid Game competition is a six-round competition that pits hundreds of contestants against one another in a series of simple children’s games—all for a 45.6 billion won prize (about $32.45 million, at the time of this writing). If the players win, they continue onto the next round. If they lose, they die. The game takes place annually and is implied to be held in various places around the world. Gi-hun’s Season 1 experience is the 33rd Squid Game.
The games are held in a massive compound on a deserted island somewhere off of the Korean peninsula. They are an elaborate operation that requires bringing in workers as well as contestants. Workers wear pink jumpsuits with masks that conceal both their identity and their status as a worker.From lowest to highest tier: Circles are maintenance workers. Triangles are soldiers. Squares are managers. Some of the workers have a side hustle, harvesting the organs from deceased or dying contestants for sale on the black market.
The Front Man oversees all of the Squid Game workers, making sure everything runs smoothly in what is essentially a series of massacres. He also plays host to the rich men who come to watch the game in person, betting on the outcomes.
The Front Man begins the series as a mysterious figure, but we eventually learn he is the winner of the 28th Squid Game which took place in 2015. After winning, he was recruited to become a part of the operation. His name is Hwang In-ho, and he is the brother of Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon).
Jun-ho is a good-natured and determined detective who spends Season 1 looking for his missing brother, In-ho. When Jun-ho discovers In-ho was a competitor in the mysterious game, he goes undercover as a worker to find out more.
Jun-ho is horrified by what he finds, and manages to escape from the Squid Game compound with evidence of the horrific competition. Ironically, this is what allows a reunion with his brother, who hunts him down as the Front Man. When Jun-ho refuses to surrender to his brother, In-ho shoots him, and Jun-ho falls off a cliff, seemingly to his death. However, as promo for Season 2 has shown, Jun-ho survived and will be back.
Read more: Behind the High-Stakes Creation of Squid Game 2
The Squid Game was created by a group of uber rich, bored friends, probably around 1988. This group included Oh Il-nam (Oh Yeong-su), an older Korean man who pretended to be a contestant alongside Gi-hun and the others in Season 1. Gi-hun befriends Il-nam, and grieves when the old man loses a round. Later, he discovers Il-nam did not die in the game because he controls the game.
While Il-nam dies from a brain tumor in the Season 1 finale, some of his Squid Game co-creators are presumably still alive. Whoever the people pulling the strings are, the Front Man usually acts as their in-person representative.
When Gi-hun returns home after winning the Squid Game in the Season 1 finale, he finds his mother, who suffers from diabetes, dead. A year later, Il-nam, who is on his deathbed, contacts Gi-hun, asking to meet. Gi-hun has a chance to confront the man he thought had been his friend, but Il-nam shows no remorse for having created the game, as he sees humans as inherently selfish and unworthy. They make a bet about the inherent goodness of humanity, which Il-nam loses, dying moments later.
The experience spurs a lethargic Gi-hun into action. He remembers the promises he made to two of his fellow contestants: Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon), a North Korean defector who left behind her little brother, and Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), Gi-hun’s neighborhood friend who left behind his mother. Gi-hun drops off Sae-byeok’s brother with Sang-woo’s mom, and leaves them half of his prize money.
Then, Gi-hun makes plans to visit his daughter in Los Angeles. However, on his way to the airport to visit his daughter in the U.S., he spots The Recruiter playing ddjaki with someone in a Seoul subway station. While The Recruiter evades him, Gi-hun manages to snatch the Squid Game calling card from the would-be contestant.
Gi-hun continues to the airport but, as he is walking down the skybridge to board the plane, he changes his mind. He turns back towards Seoul, and back toward the Squid Game. He calls the number on the card and tells whoever picks up: “Listen carefully. I’m not a horse. I’m a person. That’s why I want to know who you people are, and how you can do these horrible things to people … It wasn’t a dream. I can’t forgive you for everything you’re doing.” This is where Squid Game Season 2 picks up.
Hwang Dong-hyuk has his work cut out for him. There are two more seasons of Squid Game coming up—the second premiering Dec. 26, and the third set for a 2025 release. Creating what has become one of South Korea’s most valuable intellectual properties—a 12-year ordeal in itself—has come at a price, and that’s not just counting the at least eight teeth he lost due to the stress of filming the first season. “I had to write, create and shoot seasons two and three, back to back,” he tells TIME. “Just the sheer physical volume of it all was very intense.”
No one foresaw the runaway success of Squid Game, which was meant to be, like other South Korean dramas, a one-off. But after the 2021 show blew up and caught the attention of audiences worldwide, Netflix and the show’s creator have been working to one-up their initial offering, in hopes of expanding the legacy the series has created.
To everyone’s surprise, Squid Game ended up as Netflix’s most viewed series to date, going on to win six Emmy awards—including a historic Best Director for Hwang—out of 14 nominations. The show would create almost $900 million in value for the company—more than 40 times the cost of producing the nine-episode dystopian drama. Its success was a testament to Parasite director Bong Joon-ho’s message when he won a Golden Globe for that film just one year before Squid Game’s premiere: people can, indeed, overcome the barrier of subtitles for a promising story.
Even greater than the laurels was Squid Game’s indelible impact on pop culture. Squid Game significantly extended the global demand for Korean entertainment beyond K-pop. The trademark green tracksuits, sneakers, masks with the triangle-circle-square trinity, and even dalgona candy the show featured flew off the shelves, and video game versions spawned in the show’s wake.
But it wasn’t just a passing fad: in the years that followed, the success of Squid Game has inspired an ever-expanding universe of content, fueling the appetite for shows echoing its themes. Culinary Class Wars, a cook-off series released earlier this year with similar ideas related to the social hierarchy, has been perceived by some audiences as “MasterChef meets Squid Game.” MrBeast promised the largest cash prize in TV history for a similar winner-takes-all game show; his company was sued for allegedly poor treatment of the contestants during its production. Squid Game gave way to its own Netflix reality game show, replicating the premise of pooling together individuals to fight to the (figurative) “death” for a $4.56 million cash prize. David Fincher reportedly will be part of an English-language adaptation of the show for Netflix.
No Korean content from Netflix has come close to Squid Game’s success. The streaming platform is actively searching for its successor, pumping as much as $2.5 billion into K-productions. “While Squid Game has become a global phenomenon, we continue to partner with local creators to tell stories that resonate with local audiences,” Don Kang, Netflix Vice President of Content for Korea, tells TIME. For now, the streaming platform continues to squeeze everything it can out of the IP: selling tracksuits and other Squid Game merchandise, making massive Young-hee dolls appear in cities to generate buzz for the new season, and releasing its own online video game. Brands are continuously attaching themselves to what has now become a bankable franchise: Burger King France will allow customers to order from Squid Game menus, Xbox will have its own Squid Game controller, and Johnnie Walker has designed Squid Game bottles. The capitalist feast is ironic given the franchise’s anti-capitalist critique, and Netflix has received criticism for it.
But Hwang knows it all comes back to a quality show underpinning everything now in its orbit. The pressure is on him and his team to replicate their earlier success, a tall order considering what a factor the sheer surprise of the phenomenon, impossible to replicate now, played back in 2021.
Hwang does not shy away from the primary reason he created a second—and third—season: “Money.” He says he didn’t make much during the first season—as he was paid according to his contract and not according to how well the show performed. A follow-up could give Hwang the return on his investment, and he’s promised that the show’s sophomore season will be bigger and better. “While I didn’t have any specific plans for a subsequent season, I did leave in a few untied knots in Season 1 for a story to further develop,” says Hwang. Those unanswered questions include how protagonist Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) would exact vengeance on the deadly Games’ overseer, the Front Man’s backstory, and what happens to the detective who managed to infiltrate the game—only to be shot in the end. Hwang says those loose ends “will allow for a natural and organic flow of the story,” and that expanding the in-show universe was “not that huge of a challenge.”
Choice—and the consequences of one’s choices as they “create different conflicts and divisions”—is Hwang’s focus this season. The set has been redesigned: a huge X (no) and O (yes) is now the centerpiece of the player dormitories. Now, all that’s needed for players to leave the game is a majority vote at the end of each round, and the accumulated earnings at that point would so far be equally split among the survivors. Hwang says he hopes to convey the importance of a vote to the show’s Korean audience, especially after South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol threatened to end democracy in the country with a martial law declaration earlier this month. “It will be yet another opportunity for all of us to reflect on why we should be more involved and more interested in politics, why one vote that we each get to cast is so precious,” he says.
With a new installment also comes the debut of new games, as well as a whole new cast coming in after almost everyone was killed off in the last season. Lee Byung-hun, who plays the masked Front Man, says this is reason for excitement. “I think the cast itself empowers Squid Game, and in this season, they have all performed extremely well with very convincing and alive roles,” he says. Season 1’s cast was rewarded for their performances: Lee Jung-jae with an Emmy and a Screen Actors Guild Award, and former cast members Oh Young-soo, Lee You-mi, and Jung Ho-yeon with various accolades for their first season characters.
And while some are reprising their roles, including Wi Ha-jun as the detective and Gong Yoo as the Recruiter, Squid Game 2 welcomes Korean industry veterans Kang Ae-sim, The Glory’s Park Sung-hoon, and Sweet Home’s Park Gyu-young and Lee Jin-uk. Also joining the cast are pop stars with established followings, including Jo Yu-ri from former girl group Iz*One, and actor-singer Yim Si-wan. “The second season is not only a lot more dynamic, but it’s also a lot greater in scale,” Lee Byung-hun adds.
A new player roster also presents several new personal and grounded storylines: from a mother and son pairing, to a transgender woman who needs money for gender-affirming surgery, to a YouTuber who lost large sums in a cryptocurrency scam. Lee Seo-hwan, who briefly appeared in Season 1 as Gi-hun’s friend at the horse race, takes on a bigger role as he joins the Game just as Gi-hun reenters. “I guess he’s a big risk factor to Gi-hun regarding his big plan,” Seo-hwan tells TIME, given the personal connection between his character and Gi-hun.
Meanwhile, Lee Byung-hun says his character, whom we knew little about last season, will have his story fleshed out. Lee Jung-jae says his measure of success for his own performance is telegraphing the complex morality of his character, as Gi-hun constantly calculates the correctness of his choices.“He ultimately tries to do the right thing, but along the path to doing the right thing, there are so many temptations to choose little things that are bad,” Byung-hun tells TIME, even if those little things ultimately serve Gi-hun’s greater end goal.
It remains to be seen how the new episodes will stack up against the first set among audiences and critics, though Squid Game 2 got an early boost when it was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best TV Drama before its premiere. For Hwang, awards aside, the show must entertain, first and foremost. “I hope that you can spend the year end watching the show, just have a blast, escape from reality and have a lot of fun,” he says. “As a creator, nothing will be more rewarding than that.”
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