Netflix revealed this Tuesday that nearly 111 million viewers have watched the series. squid game Since its nine episodes came in the platform’s catalog only a month back. According to a tweet from the company, South Korean Hwang Dong-hyuk’s dystopian creation matches his “greatest debut ever”, for example, titles like bridgerton, which debuted in December last year and would have attracted around 82 million subscribers in the first weeks.
on the weekend, squid game occupied the first place in the list of the most popular titles of the service. streaming in 90 countries (including Portugal and the United States). Ted Sarandos, director of content at Netflix — whose method of counting viewers differs from the traditional model (a subscriber only needs to contact a film or series for two minutes for the company to count that conversation) — It has already been said that the series could indeed become the “biggest hit of all time” as far as the platform’s original productions are concerned.
In the series’ universe, 456 people with financial problems enter an obscure contest that will award the winner a prize of approximately 33 million euros. What they don’t know is that the tournament is made up of six children’s games – and whoever fails to qualify for the next round is shot.
It is on the topic of class inequality that director and screenwriter Hwang Dong-hyuk tries to focus the discussion. “The idea was to write an allegory of today’s capitalist society that portrayed extreme competition. But I wanted to use the kind of characters we know in real life.” recently told the magazine Diversity, which he also explained that, despite being able to export some developments in the arts and entertainment fields of his native country – music group BTS, artist Psy and Oscarized filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, for example – South Korean Society is also “extremely competitive and tense”: “We have 50 million people in a small space. And, cut off from the Asian mainland by North Korea, we have developed an island mentality. We are always preparing for the next crisis. In a way it is a motivating factor, but so much competition has its side effects as well.”
squid game It was produced and rolled out between June and October 2020 – that is, in full pandemic. In February this year, Netflix announced its intention to invest about $500 million (just over 432 million euros) in the production of original South Korean feature films and series in 2021.
