You take a first energy drink. This stuff doesn’t taste very tasty, but it makes you wide awake. So you take another one. And the next. You can’t stop doing it, and then you’re addicted. It’s no different with Netflix’s new series Squid Game.
Never before in the history of streaming has a series taken over the world as quickly as Squid Game. The nine-part saga about the voluntary but deadly struggle for survival by participants in a kind of prison camp has gone to the top of the charts in almost every country in just three days.
13 million followers on Instagram and immediately became famous worldwide with her first role as an actress: That’s Jung Ho-yeon (28).
The Seoul-born South Korean model, who previously drew attention for her fiery red hair at fashion events and on the docusoap “Korea’s Next Top Model,” has catapulted herself into the premier league of a new generation of Asian stars with the Netflix series “Squid Game.”
Jung Ho-yeon was nominated as “Top Newcomer” and “Model of the Year” in 2017. A year earlier she designed a collection for the fashion label Louis Vuitton. She can be seen in commercials for Chanel, Gap and Hermès, among others. Her picture was on the covers of famous fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, where she was often portrayed in the editorials as the new supermodel.
This is completely insane. Just how insanely successful Squid Game is can be seen by the fact that new fan merchandise for the series is now popping up on the internet every hour. For Halloween, you can already shop on the web for masks and prisoner suits or the red uniforms of the guards with the look from the series.
You have to give it a shot: The series was invented, written and directed by the same man who wanted to turn it into a feature film an incredible 13 years ago. Only, no producer was willing to make a feature film out of this whacky story. The production costs of Squid Game as a nine-part Netflix series tell their own story in the process.
There are many voices accusing Squid Game and Netflix of actually recycling Hollywood movies like “The Hunger Games” here. The only stupid thing about it is that the writer and director Dong-hyuk Hwang had already written the original feature film with this story in 2008 – and thus four years before the first part of the “Tribute of Panem”.
Dong-hyuk Hwang (50) was asked in an interview why it took him so long to finally film Squid Game. His answer: “Maybe I still have to learn what teamwork means”.
I think this guy knows exactly how people work with each other and especially against each other! Because in his series he distinguishes between the individual characters and their social skills as precisely as a surgeon does between healthy and diseased organs during an autopsy. Maybe Hwang just doesn’t want to have his crass ideas ruined by too many people.
Dong-hyuk Hwang says he spent six months writing the first two episodes of the series alone. As a writer, it would have taken him a very long time to realize what the key to success really is with this series. Namely, the incredible banality of the tests that the participants in Squid Game must pass at the risk of death. Because it is this simplicity that allows the viewer to concentrate on the characters in the series and become one with them.
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