The Real Reason Why Squid Game Isn’t Getting a Fourth Season
Streaming services and movie studios rarely take the sensible step of stopping in their tracks. When they find a hit show or movie, they usually churn out sequel after sequel until interest dries up. Not so with Netflix.
The creator of one of Netflix’s most popular shows, Squid Game, has announced that its upcoming third season will be its last, and there’s a good reason for that.
Season two of Squid Game dropped late last month and became Netflix’s biggest TV debut ever, garnering 126.2 million total views over 11 days. However, new research shows that the show was mentioned in 8.9% fewer articles last year than it was in 2021, when its first season became a streaming smash.
Squid Game’s success is due to its timely viral premise, which sees cash-strapped gamers take part in a deadly series of secret games for a chance to win $30 million. The games are overseen by the Front Man, a mysterious figure dressed in black and protected by an army of masked guards in pink suits.
The story is told from the point of view of Seung Ji-hoon, a divorced father and gambling addict who lives with his elderly mother. He soon discovers that losing a game results in his death, which increases the prize pool. The story turns into a tense narrative as Ji-hoon wins and sets out to take revenge on the club president, only to be told that he cannot stop the games because human nature perpetuates them.
The survival horror thriller series was created, written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk who based the events on his own economic struggles as well as the class disparity in South Korea.
The series was a critical and commercial success, winning six Emmy Awards and one Golden Globe Award. The first season remains the most-watched show on Netflix with 265.2 million views in its first 91 days of airing, but its successor is expected to surpass it after amassing nearly half that number with 80 days remaining.
Season 3 is being filmed simultaneously with season 2 and is expected to premiere in June. All that remains after that is an English-language version directed by David Fincher, with Dong-hyuk saying that season 3 will be “the end.”
Critics have praised the approach, with ScreenRant writing that even if it were extended to a fourth season, “the core idea of survival and Ji-hoon’s quest for revenge can feel repetitive. So by using the main story engines only as narrative devices until Season 3, Squid Game looks set to end on a high note where it’s neither boring nor burdened with predictable story developments.” The timing seems to be right.
Last year, Squid Game was mentioned a total of 21,866 times in the media, according to data from Factiva, a search engine owned by Dow Jones that includes content from 33,000 news sources, data, and information in 32 languages. By contrast, as the table below shows, in 2021, Squid Game was mentioned 24,014 times, rising to 11,943 times in October, the month after its launch. That was a staggering 51.4% more than the 7,890 mentions the show received in the media last month when its second season debuted.
The data starkly shows how Squid Game became an almost overnight success, taking audiences completely by surprise. It launched with such little fanfare that it was not even mentioned in the media at all in June and July 2021, just a few months before its debut. It attracted 1,524 articles upon its launch in September 2021 and surged nearly eightfold the following month as word spread.
By contrast, the series’ lowest number of mentions last year was 621 in April, and while it peaked at 7,890 mentions upon its launch in December, that was only a three-fold increase from the previous month. This suggests that interest in the series is slowing down as its format is no longer revolutionary and the market has become saturated, especially as the series has signed several commercial partnerships.
Perhaps the most telling comparison is with Stranger Things , Netflix’s 1980s-set sci-fi horror series. Despite not having a new series last year, it was mentioned 22,394 times in the media, more than Squid Game . In November, Netflix confirmed that the fifth and final season of Stranger Things would premiere in 2025, pushing the show’s mention count that month to 2,268. That was just 7.7% less than Squid Game in November, even though the show was about to debut its second season.
Netflix shareholders may not like this, but they should be thankful that it saves them the risk of having to keep the show going amid waning interest. And unlike the characters in Squid Game themselves, Netflix clearly knows that some games aren’t worth playing.
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