Seoul – Netflix's third and last season of the “Squid” game broke audience records on the transmission platform after its launch on June 27, marking an appropriate closure for what may have been the most successful South Korean television series in history.
Although the reviews have been mixed, season 3 recorded more than 60 million visits in the first three days and exceeded the classification tables in the 93 countries, which makes it the largest launch of Netflix to date.
“Sweetland game” has been a transformative for South Korea, with much of the national reaction focused not on the plot, but on the prestige it has brought to the country. In Seoul, fans celebrated with a parade to commemorate the end of the program, closing the main roads to give way to a march band and a parade of characters in the program.
In a procession section, a phalanx of the masked guards of the program, dressed in their characteristic pink uniforms, carried versions of the coffins that appear in the program to take the losers of the survival game. They joined actors who played the contestants, who staggered exaggerated expressions, as if the cruel stakes of the game had been revealed.
In the admirers event that culminated the night, the creator of the Hwang Dong-Hyuk series thanked the program spectators and shared the bittersweet of everything that ended.
“I gave everything to this project, so the idea of the whole end makes me a little sad,” he said. “But at the same time, I lived with such a heavy weight on my shoulders for so long that it feels liberating to leave everything.”
Despite the global fame during the night, “squid game” brought it (it is the series of all the most observed Netflix), Hwang has spoken extensively about the physical and mental work of creating the show.
(Lee Jin-Man / Associated Press)
He without success purchased The program for a decade until Netflix resumed the first season in 2019, paying the director “enough to put food on the table”, while claiming all the intellectual property rights of the program. During production for the first season, which was launched in 2021, Hwang lost several teeth due to stress.
An entrance door to Korean content for many worldwide, the show “Square game” served to highlight previously less known aspects of the culture of South Korea, which brings inventions such as Dalgona Café, made with a traditional Korean sweet that appeared in the show, to places like Los Angeles and New York.
The program also clarified a path for the global success of other South Korea series, accelerating a golden age of “Hallyu” (the Korean wave) that has promoted tourism and exports of food and cosmetics, as well as the international interest in the learning of Korea.
But together with its worldly successes, the program also caused conversations about socioeconomic inequality in South Korean society, such as the prevalence of debt, which looms in the background stories of several characters.
A few years ago, President Lee Jae-Myung, a proponent of debt relief for a long time, said: “The 'squid game' reveals the gloomy realities of our society. A recreation courtyard in which participants contribute their lives to pay their debt is more than competition, it is a sand in which he is fighting to survive.”
In 2022, the program made history as the first television series that is not English and the first Korean series to win a Screen actors guild awardtaking home three in total. He also won six Emmy awards. That same year, the city of Los Angeles designated on September 17, the launch date of the series, as “Square Day Day.”
Although Hwang has said in the media interviews that has ended with the “squid game” franchise, the end of season 3, which presents Cate Blanchett in a cameo as a recruiter for games that are the homonym of the program, has revived rumors that the filmmaker David Fincher can choose for an English split in the future.
While he said that he had initially written a more conventional happy ending, Hwang has described the last season of “Squid Game” as a last sobering blow with his unwavering portrait of Cthroat capitalism.
“I wanted to concentrate on season 3 on how in this world, where incessant greed always feeds, it is like a jungle: the strong weak food, where people go up more by stepping on other people's heads,” he. ” said The Times Michael Ordona last month.
“Upon reaching season 3, because the economic system has failed us, politics has failed us, it seems that we have no hope,” he added. “What hope we have as a human race when we can no longer control our own greed? I wanted to explore that. And in particular, wanted [pose] That question for myself. “
