Posted in: Netflix, TV | Tagged: death game, Hwang Dong-hyuk, netflix, squid game, streaming

Squid Game: Hwang Dong-Hyuk Planning Season 2; Talks S01 Alt Ending

Squid Game is still in the news, still a recurring meme all over the internet. When it has over 111 million viewers worldwide, it's safe to say Squid Game is the biggest and most popular TV show in the world. Now the series creator, writer-director Hwang Dong-Hyuk has confirmed he is making plans for how a second season would play out.

At a red-carpet screening event at Neuhouse Hollywood in Los Angeles on Monday night, Hwang admitted that he has begun thinking about Season 2, even though Netflix has not officially announced one yet. It seems inevitable, though. The numbers are just too big for any studio to ignore. It seems Squid Game's allegory of life being nasty, brutish & short under Capitalism is hitting the nail on the head of the zeitgeist right now. "Although these games that I played as a child in Korean, they're all simple and easy games," he said. "Despite what culture you're from, I thought these games were very easy to understand and enjoyable to watch. I did try to choose simple and easier games."

Hwang said, "As for the stories behind each character, even though they are uniquely Korean with Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) being an ex-auto worker, Ali (Anupam Tripathi) being a Pakistani immigrant, Sae-byuk (Jung Ho-yeon) who's a North Korean refugee, you see people with these stories anywhere in the world. Personally, I was very confident this story would be understood globally and these stories would resonate with a global audience. I felt confident the audience would understand what these characters would go through. On a personal level, I always had the confidence when we showed Squid Game, this was not going to be a spectacle, something you see from afar, but instead, something that is close to the heart and hits home."

"That's my homework right now, figuring out how to take what I created in season one and making something new and unexpected," Dong-hyuk told Deadline. "There's been so much pressure, so much demand and so much love for a second season. So I almost feel like you leave us no choice!" Hwang told the Associated Press on Tuesday. "But I will say there will indeed be a second season. It's in my head right now. I'm in the planning process currently. But I do think it's too early to say when and how that's going to happen."

Of course, if Hwang chose the other ending considered then a second season would've been a tough call. "We actually wrestled between two different scenarios for the ending," Hwang revealed to EW. "There was one, the other alternate ending, where Gi-hun would get on the plane and leave. And then there was of course the one where he would turn back and walk towards the camera. We constantly asked ourselves, is it really right for Gi-hun to make the decision to leave and go see his family, to pursue his own happiness? Is that the right way for us to really propose the question or the message that we wanted to convey through the series?" But the ending they went with just felt like the right move to play up one of the show's main themes. "We came to the conclusion that the question that we wanted to propose cannot be done if he left on the plane," Hwang says. "The question that we want to answer — why has the world come to what it is now? — can only be answered or can only be proposed if Gi-hun turned back and walked towards the camera. So that's how we ended up with that ending in the finale."

Hwang confirmed that Seong Gi-hun, the protagonist of the 1st season of Squid Game played by Lee Jung-jae, would return. "I will promise you this, Gi-hun will come back," Hwang told the Associated Press while standing beside Lee. "He will do something for the world." And thanks to Squid Game's popularity, Netflix now has Hwang's 3 previous movies available for streaming in the US.

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