Squid Game reveals the narrative possibilities unleashed by global on-demand commissioning. Showrunner, Hwang Dong-hyuk, spent eleven years trying to get the project greenlit, before Netflix saw its opportunity to commission it as an original in order to grow its under-indexing South Korean userbase (in Q2 2021, Netflix weekly active use was twenty percentage points below the international average). Squid Game is a fresh, new original story arc, told in the context of a society that is both unfamiliar yet increasingly present and of interest to non-Koreans through K-pop and K-drama.
No Time to Die has been virtually guaranteed engagement through its established franchise fanbase, combined with the marketing heft of a big studio (Universal) alongside the favourable movie-going option for IRL-hungry consumers. Squid Game, however, has had to earn its engagement success as the current most- viewed show on Netflix.
Ironically, No Time to Die’s director is Carey Fukunaga, who single-handedly rebooted a tired franchise as the director and producer of the first season of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective back in 2014. Fellow industry veteran, Hwang Dong- hyuk, however, has stayed true to his innovative indie roots to finally deliver a new way of seeing the world – thus breaking through the peak attention constraints of the global entertainment landscape of 2021. In addition, he has delivered the first non-US centric hit for Netflix at a time when the service finally has serious global entertainment competition from Disney+, Paramount+ and HBO Max.
Expect more Squid Game and less No Time to Die to be winning the video attention battles of 2022 and beyond.