Squid Game Season 2 is just around the corner, premiering on Netflix on December 26, as as Seong Gi-hun, a.k.a. Player 456 (played Lee Jung-jae) ultimately decides to re-enter the games in an effort to save the other players, but the deadly competition won't end there. Netflix already confirmed a third and final season that's scheduled to premiere in 2025, although an exact release date hasn't been announced yet. That wasn't the original plan of series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk, but he has a practical reason for splitting the show into two final seasons.
"I originally envisioned seasons 2 and 3 as a single story," revealed to Entertainment Weekly. "That's how I wrote it. But in the process, it came out to be too many episodes. So I thought it'd be better to divide it into two." According to previous reports, Hwang spent a decade developing Squid Game Season 1, which premiered on Netflix in September 2021. But he was able to complete two more seasons in three years.
“That’s how I wrote it. But in the process, it came out to be too many episodes,” he added, revealing that the shorter time frame actually lead him to write far more than he anticipated “So I thought it’d be better to divide it into two.”
Squid Game creator originally only planned one season
"Honestly, when I was first working on the first season, I didn't have any plans or thoughts about there ever being further seasons," Hwang admitted in a previous interview with EW. "In Korea, it's not very common for series to have multiple seasons, and also because season 1 was so incredibly demanding, so I don't think I had the confidence to once again work on further [seasons] where I would be the writer, director, and creator all throughout."
"I do remember when I was finishing up my scripts for the first season, towards the end, I did have this vague idea," he continued. "And I got to thinking about creating seasons 2 and 3, firstly because of the huge success of season 1, as well as there being just so much anticipation and expectation for the story to further develop by the fans. So I revisited that little bit of a possibility that I had left towards the end of season 1 after it was created, and we wanted to do a further story."
In a recent interview with the BBC, Hwang revealed that "money" motivated him to make more seasons of Squid Game. "Money…Even though the first series was such a huge global success, honestly I didn’t make much," he admitted “So doing the second series will help compensate me for the success of the first one too."
Despite Squid Game's massive global success, Hwang didn't get paid as much as what many fans had suspected. According to a June 2023 report by the LA Times, he was merely paid a flat fee when he sold the series to Netlfix, meaning that he wasn't been able to gain any residuals from the high profits massive success of the first season. The contract that the writer-director signed also forfeited his rights to all intellectual property related to the show he created.
Hwang has also creative reasons for returning to Squid Game, noting that there's still more story to tell. “And I didn’t fully finish the story,” Hwang told BBC. With a new story and new cast of characters to develop, Dong-hyuk also said that "the stress I feel now is much greater." Making the sequel also brought up a new question for the creator, “When making this series, I constantly asked myself ‘do we humans have what it takes to steer the world off this downhill path?’. Honestly, I don’t know."
Who are the cast of Squid Game Season 2?
Alongside Lee Jung-jae, other returning cast members for the second season of Squid Game include Gong Yoo, Wi Ha-joon, and Lee Byung-hun. The newcomers joining them in Season 2 are Park Gyu-young, Lee Jin-uk, Yim Si-wan, Kang Ha-neul, Park Sung-hoon, Yang Dong-geun, Choi Seung-hyun, Roh Jae-won, Kang Ae-sim, Lee David, Won Ji-an, and Jo Yu-ri.
Check out the trailer for Squid Game Season 2 below:
All 7 episodes of Squid Game Season 2 are scheduled to release on Netlfix on December 26.
