Squid Game is a huge hit for Netflix — it’s officially the most-watched series in the streaming service’s history, beating Bridgerton. It’s also been hugely lucrative. The Korean series is “worth almost $900 million in value for the company,” Bloomberg reports, “underscoring the windfall that one mega-hit can generate in the streaming era.”
Squid Game stands out both for its popularity, and its relatively low cost. The South Korean show, about indebted people in a deadly contest for a cash prize, generated $891.1 million in impact value, a metric the company uses to assess the performance from individual shows. The show cost just $21.4 million to produce — about $2.4 million an episode. Those figures are just for the first season, and stem from a document that details Netflix’s performance metrics for the show.
The entire season of Squid Game cost as much as two episodes of Game of Thrones or HBO’s upcoming The Last of Us. This isn’t quite a “The Blair Witch Project making $248.6 million on a $500,000 budget” situation, but it’s still an unexpected windfall for Netflix — which is capitalizing on the show’s success with Halloween costumes.
Netflix estimates that 132 million people have watched at least two minutes of Squid Game, the amount of time the streamer counts as a “view.” As for what’s next for the show, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk said “there are a lot of possibilities out there for season two storylines.” The budget will probably be slightly bigger for season two.
(Via Bloomberg)
