Overview
Let the games begin — again. Following a three-year wait since its award-winning first season, and after teasing the show's 2024 return since January, Squid Game will start playing again on Boxing Day. If you usually spend the day after Christmas shopping, at the cinema or recovering from your food coma by trying to play backyard cricket, you now have other plans if you want to catch the next instalment of the South Korean thriller ASAP.
Netflix has not only advised when its huge 2021 hit — one of the best new TV programs of that year, in fact — will finally make a comeback, but has also announced that there's even more in store. After Squid Game season two arrives on Thursday, December 26, 2024, Squid Game season three will drop sometime in 2025. There's no exact date for the latter as yet, but it will be the final season, closing out the Squid Game story.
The streaming platform revealed both pieces of news with a date announcement teaser that features a running track, competitors in recognisable green tracksuits, and also-familiar folks in red watching on alongside the masked Front Man — and with a letter from series director, writer and executive producer Hwang Dong-hyuk.
"I am beyond excited to be writing this letter to announce the date for season two and share the news of season three, the final season," said Hwang.
"Seong Gi-hun, who vowed revenge at the end of season one, returns and joins the game again. Will he succeed in getting his revenge? Front Man doesn't seem to be an easy opponent this time, either. The fierce clash between their two worlds will continue into the series finale with season three, which will be brought to you next year."
So, yes, season one's protagonist Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae, The Acolyte) is back. So is his nemesis (Lee Byung-hun, The Magnificent Seven). If you're wondering what else is in store after the hefty gap — Squid Game was such a huge smash in it first season that Netflix confirmed at the beginning of 2022 that more was on the way, and also released a teaser trailer for it the same year, before announcing its new cast members in 2023 — a few further details were dropped earlier in the year.
That's when Netflix previously unveiled a brief snippet of Squid Game season two, arriving in a broader trailer for Netflix's slate for the year — as it releases every 12 months. In the footage, Seong Gi-hun answers a phone call while at the airport sporting his newly crimson locks. He's soon told "you're going to regret the choice you've made". Cue his statement of vengeance; Squid Game meets John Wick, anyone?
Wi Ha-joon (Little Women) is back as detective Hwang Jun-ho, as is Gong Yoo (Train to Busan) as the man in the suit who got Gi-hun into the game in the first place. A show about a deadly competition that has folks battling for ridiculous riches comes with a hefty bodycount, which means that new faces were always going to be essential in Squid Game season two — so that's where Yim Si-wan (Emergency Declaration), Kang Ha-neul (Insider), Park Sung-hoon (The Glory) and Yang Dong-geun (Yaksha: Ruthless Operations) all come in.
If you somehow missed all things Squid Game when it premiered, even after it became bigger than everything from Stranger Things to Bridgerton, the Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning series serves up a puzzle-like storyline and unflinching savagery, which unsurprisingly makes quite the combination. It also steps into societal divides within South Korea, a topic that wasn't invented by Parasite, Bong Joon-ho's excellent Oscar-winning 2019 thriller, but has been given a boost after that stellar flick's success.
Accordingly, it's easy to see thematic and narrative parallels between Parasite and Squid Game, although Netflix's highly addictive series goes with a Battle Royale and Hunger Games-style setup. Here, 456 competitors are selected to work their way through six seemingly easy children's games. They're all given numbers and green tracksuits, they're competing for 45.6 billion won, and it turns out that they've also all made their way to the contest after being singled out for having enormous debts.
Netflix turned the show's whole premise into an IRL competition series as well, which debuted in 2023 — without any murders, of course. Squid Game: The Challenge has already been picked up for a second season.
Check out Netflix's season two date announcement clip for Squid Game season below:
Squid Game season two will stream via Netflix from Thursday, December 26, 2024. Season three will arrive in 2025 — we'll update you when an exact release date for it is announced.
Images: Netflix.