The South Korean drama Squid Game, which is about a dystopian future, has had 111 million views on Netflix in the four weeks since it first came out, the service said on Tuesday.
An unprecedented worldwide viral hit imagines a macabre world in which marginalised people are pitted against each other in traditional children’s games. Losers are executed while winners can walk away with millions of dollars.
Squid Game has topped Netflix charts in over 80 countries after spreading word-of-mouth, mainly on social media.
Netflix’s Squid Game, a Korean drama, has become a worldwide hit. Because Squid Game is so popular, the question of who should pay for the growing amount of internet traffic has come up again. After reaching 111 million viewers, Squid Game has officially become Netflix’s most popular series launch ever.
Instead, Netflix’s internal metric, which includes all accounts that watched at least two minutes of an episode, showed that the period drama Bridgerton was a big hit with 82 million subscribers.
The success of Squid Game follows in the footsteps of the K-pop band BTS and the Oscar-winning movie Parasite. This shows that South Korea is having a bigger and bigger impact on popular culture worldwide.
Netflix’s efforts to produce more international and non-English-language content are paying off with this new success. Lupin, a French-language series, debuted as the third-most-popular streaming series. To reach a broader audience, Netflix has dubbed and subtitled versions of Squid Game available in multiple languages.
The world’s most popular streaming service announced in February that it would spend $500 million on Korean series and films this year alone.
