‘Squid Game’ Season 2 Debuts to Massive 68 Million Views
Brian Welk
“Squid Game” is as big as ever. Netflix revealed that the second season of the smash South Korean drama debuted to a whopping 68 million views globally since debuting on the streamer on December 25.
Netflix says it’s a record for the streamer, notching the most views in a premiere week ever, beating a record set by “Wednesday” in 2022, which managed only 50.1 million views. It has already climbed to No. 7 on Netflix’s All-Time most popular list of Non-English language series, cracking the list in just three days.
But Season 2 is not quite as big as Season 1 just yet, which remains the biggest Netflix show, English or international, of all time. The first season has spent 24 weeks in the Global Top 10, even landing back in the Top 10 this week with another 8.1 million views. It was also brought back thanks to the “Squid Game” mobile video game and the arrival of the “Squid Game: The Challenge” reality series last year. When it first aired back in September 2021, it remained on the Top 10 for 19 straight weeks into January of 2022.
And while it was a hit from the get-go, it had launched mid-week, and “Squid Game” didn’t become a word of mouth sensation until its second week, when it exploded to 448 million viewing hours in a week. That helped catapult it to the No. 1 all time slot, notching 265.2 million views globally and 2.2 billion viewing hours in its initial 90 days on the service. The new season will have a long road to reach that level of viewership.
“Squid Game” was one of the first major recipients of the Netflix Top 10 bump. The service didn’t start publishing Top 10 viewing results until summer 2021, and having a show top the list each week, an international one no less, was a great way for Netflix to brag about its truly global reach. At the time though, Netflix only tracked hours viewed, not total viewers, and it has since refined its methodology, giving more weight to overall viewers rather than simply series or films with long run times.
Season 2 of “Squid Game” is a condensed seven episodes, ending on a cliffhanger before the arrival of Season 3 — also the conclusion to the series — in late 2025. The world of “Squid Game” could continue to expand following the show’s conclusion, as reports have circulated that David Fincher could direct an English-language spinoff for Netflix.
Lee Jung-jae stars in the series from creator and showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk, which follows a dystopian world in which people struggling with debt are given the chance to win a fortune by playing children’s games — only to find out that they’ll be killed if they lose. The second season follows the victor of the first season’s games, Seong Gi-hun, as he tries to use his winnings to track down the masked Front Man operating the games and shut them down for good.
Reviews of Season 2 were a bit more muted, with IndieWire’s Ben Travers writing that the return to the games this time around lacked some of the same novelty that going into this colorful and deadly world evoked the first time around.
Netflix had a big Christmas, averaging over 30 million viewers globally for each of its NFL Christmas games. It will be the first of three seasons worth of Christmas games for Netflix. Both games were its most-viewed English-language TV titles of the week. As IndieWire previously reported, “Carry-On” has now spent three straight weeks as the No. 1 English language film, and it could be on its way to cracking the All Time Top 10. And the hour-long stand-up special “Your Friend, Nate Bargatze” managed to land at No. 4 on the English TV list when it debuted on Xmas.
