Streaming services and movie studios rarely take the sensible step of quitting whilst they are ahead. When they find a successful show or film it usually spawns sequel after sequel until interest in it is exhausted. Not Netflix.
The creator of Squid Game, one of the most popular Netflix shows, has announced that its upcoming third season will be its last and there is good reason for this.
Squid Game’s second season launched late last month and became Netflix’s biggest television debut ever with a total of 126.2 million views across 11 days. However, new research shows that the show was mentioned in 8.9% fewer articles last year than in 2021 when its first season became a smash hit for the streamer.
Squid Game’s success is thanks to its timely viral premise which sees cash-strapped players participating in a deadly series of secret games for the chance to win $30 million. The games are overseen by the Front Man, a mysterious character who is clad in black and protected by an army of masked guards in pink jumpsuits.
The story is told from the perspective of Seong Gi-hun, a divorced father and indebted gambling addict who lives with his elderly mother. He soon finds that if a player loses a game it results in their death which increases the prize pool. It makes for tense storytelling as Gi-hun triumphs and sets out for revenge against the Front Man only to be told that he can’t stop the games because human nature perpetuates them.
The survival thriller horror series was created, written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk who based it on his own economic struggles as well as the class disparity in South Korea.
It was a commercial and critical success earning six Primetime Emmy Awards and one Golden Globe. Season one still stands as Netflix’s most-watched show with 265.2 million views in its first 91 days of streaming, but its successor is reportedly likely to outpace it having amassed almost half that tally with 80 days remaining.
A third season was filmed back-to-back with the second one and is expected to be released in June. All that remains after that is an English-language version directed by David Fincher as Dong-hyuk has said season three will be the “finale”.
This approach has been praised by critics with ScreenRant writing that even if it stretched to a fourth season, “the core premise of survival and Gi-hun’s quest for revenge could feel repetitive. Therefore, by only using its key story drivers as narrative devices until season 3, Squid Game will seemingly end on a high note where it is neither tedious nor weighed down by predictable story developments.” The timing appears to be spot on.
Last year Squid Game was mentioned a total of 21,866 times in the media according to data from Factiva, a search engine owned by Dow Jones which includes content from 33,000 news, data and information sources in 32 languages. In contrast, as the table below shows, in 2021 Squid Game was mentioned 24,014 times, surging to 11,943 in October, the month after it launched. This was a staggering 51.4% more than the 7,890 mentions of the show in the media last month when its second season debuted.
The data starkly shows how Squid Game was an almost overnight success as it caught the public completely unawares. It launched with so little fanfare that it wasn’t even mentioned in the media at all in June and July 2021, just a matter of months before its debut. It attracted 1,524 articles when it launched in September 2021 and rose almost eight-fold the following month as word spread.
In contrast, the lowest it dipped to last year was 621 mentions in April and although it peaked at 7,890 when it launched in December, this was only a three-fold increase on the previous month. It suggests that interest in the show is slowing down as its format is no longer revolutionary and the market has become saturated with it, especially as the show has signed so many commercial partnerships.
Perhaps the most telling comparison is with Stranger Things, the Netflix sci-fi horror series set in the 1980s. Even though it didn’t debut a new series last year it was mentioned 22,394 times in the media, which is more than Squid Game. In November Netflix confirmed that the fifth and final Stranger Things season will debut in 2025 and this drove the number of mentions of the show that month to 2,268. It was only 7.7% less than Squid Game garnered in November despite the show being on the eve of its season two debut.
Netflix stockholders may not like the thought of Squid Game coming to an end but they should be thankful as it avoids the risk of the show continuing amidst a waning level of interest. Unlike the characters in Squid Game itself, Netflix clearly knows there are some games that aren’t worth playing.
Read the full article here