How Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Korean Smash ‘Squid Game’ Proved The Potential Of Non-English TV — Deadline Disruptors
deadline.comFirst, there was Parasite, shaking up the global film sector and snatching Oscar glory. Then, there was Squid Game.It’s been quite the three years for content from Korea, a nation that has long had an outstanding reputation for producing top quality entertainment that had nonetheless struggled to travel beyond Asia, with some exceptions.
That changed in earnest last September when Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game launched, breaking records that none could have thought breakable and stealing the zeitgeist in a way that no show has done in recent memory.
If you didn’t know someone dressing up as a Squid Game character for Halloween, you probably weren’t invited to a Halloween party.Hwang is in a reflective mood after a whirlwind half year during which time his show has shaken up the global TV landscape, sending him from relative unknown outside his home nation to being told by Steven Spielberg: “I want to steal your brain.”“I feel like I’ve been swept by the Niagara Falls over the course of the last six months and fallen off a cliff,” he says. “To have such compliments from Steven Spielberg was completely beyond my imagination.
I still can’t work out whether this is real or I’m daydreaming.”The success of Squid Game may have happened at lightning speed, but getting from idea to greenlight took a little longer.
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