TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2025: Duolingo
In early 2025, Duolingo announced that its mascot was murdered—and then, two weeks later, revealed that Duo the Owl faked its own death as a ploy to get users to complete their daily language lessons. The green bird sure knows how to build buzz, helping to turn an educational app into a cultural phenomenon. "We're competing for those five minutes of your time you may spend on TikTok or Instagram," says Chief Marketing Officer Manu Orssaud. The company's bold and playful approach to brand-building has fueled its rapid growth: Duolingo more than doubled its monthly active users from 2022 to 2024, when it amassed more than 130 million and saw revenue rise around 40% year-over-year. A tongue-in-cheek cameo in Barbie (where the doofy husband learns Spanish on Duolingo) and a strategic partnership with Netflix's Squid Game titled 'Learn Korean or Else' helped power growth; the company monitors music, TV, and social media to identify emerging language interests. But the marketing would be useless without a great product, says Orssaud: "We want our product to be so delightful and satisfying that you want to play it every day.'
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Time Magazine
43 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
What to Watch After 'Squid Game'
Squid Game has come to an end with six new episodes that were filmed back-to-back with last year's sophomore season, rewarding a global audience who were left on tenterhooks by the cliffhanger of Season 2. There, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae)—also known as Player 456—led a thwarted coup on his masked captors in the deadly elimination contest that promises to reward debt-stricken Koreans with potential billions to save them from a life of dehumanising insolvency. There's something affirming about watching dystopian television in our current moment, not because it distracts us from existential and political crises, but because it articulates our own helplessness back to us within the momentum of a drama, hopefully offering insight, empathy, and catharsis by the end. As in Squid Game, dystopian drama often plays on the barbarity of entertainment, impossible promises of curing human weakness, and finds salvation in our best qualities: solidarity, compassion, and unity. Dystopian drama is what happens when societal upheaval and science-fiction unite to reflect the danger and darkness of the modern world, and the only weapon against it is the human condition. If you're still in the mood for draconian governments, societal decline, and invasive technology pushing us towards survival, here are ten recommendations for dystopian series to watch after the climactic finale of Squid Game. If you want more mazes: Westworld Based on a nifty but slight Michael Crichton film from the '70s, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy imagined a world where corporations have the final technological say on what it means to be human. The show is (initially) set in a recreated Wild West theme park where guests interact with near-flawless androids, but the advanced, erratic programming of a few special robots sets them on a course out of their maze-like sanctuary and beyond the borders of creation. It's a thrilling, affecting, and intelligent map out of dystopia. If you want relationships: 12 Monkeys A SYFY adaptation of a beloved '90s sci-fi film sounds like a recipe for disaster, but for four seasons 12 Monkeys surpassed expectations in its story of an exciting time-travel mission to fix the past from a virus-ridden, dystopian future. Over the 47 episodes, we grow close to characters on each side of the 'past/future' divide, like scavenger James Cole (Aaron Stanford) and present-day virologist Cassie Railly (Amanda Schull), whose missions reveal just how fraught and fragile our non-apocalyptic reality actually is. If you want violent secret societies: Utopia This may be Britain's most exciting contribution to dystopian sci-fi this century—yes, that makes it better than Black Mirror. In the series, fans of a cult graphic novel try to discover how it managed to predict major world events and are soon hunted by lethal agents of the sinister 'Network." It was cancelled after two short seasons (and was further punished with a subpar American remake) but this dystopian series is filled with twists, sociopathy, and secret puppetmasters. If you want rebellion: Andor A few blockbuster series focusing on themes of injustice and unity have debuted since the Squid Game phenomenon took off, and this Star Wars saga of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) rising through the ranks of the Rebel Alliance captures the shaky bonds and emotional surges that Squid Game channels through its three seasons. In particular, the 'One Way Out' prison arc of Andor Season 1 feels almost exactly like the moments Players must go from paranoid solitude to fiercely felt camaraderie during the games. If you want weird prison vibes: Severance One of the major ways that Apple TV+'s psychological sci-fi series mirrors Squid Game is that both the Players and the Innies of the severed floor of Lumon Industries (where they can only remember their work hours and have no idea of their outside lives) have a conflicted sense of belonging in their austere, windowless prisons. The Players believe that the reward—life-changing money—is worth the impossible odds and horrid violence, and many express a desire to remain in a contest that dangles hope in front of them. Likewise, the security of the pristine severed floor discourages many Innies from exploring beyond their authorized borders. If you want class struggle: Snowpiercer There's a Korean connection to this four-season TNT sci-fi series—in between being a French graphic novel and an American show, Snowpiercer was the English-language debut of Korean director Bong Joon-ho. Both film and series are set on the Snowpiercer train, humanity's only vessel for survival in a harsh, apocalyptic winterworld, which is rigidly divided by class and provides a linear, front-to-tail path towards class revolt for the newly oppressed. Daveed Diggs, Jennifer Connelly, Sean Bean and more play passengers from the full range of social classes involved in the plight to keep the fragile Snowpiercer on the rails. If you want twisted contests: Dead Set Before he launched his multi-decade dystopian anthology Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker satirized the intersection between entertainment and violence with a miniseries about a zombie outbreak hitting the Big Brother house in Britain. Like Squid Game, Dead Set juxtaposes familiar cultural symbols and settings with grim, inevitable explosions of blood, straddling the line between twisted, compelling drama and a sobering reminder of violence lurking in our present society. If you want old-school conspiracy: The Prisoner The British affinity for dystopia is all over literature (1984, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange) but has historically crossed over into television in obscure and strange ways. This one-season triumph from 1967 is about a spy (Patrick McGoohan) imprisoned in a village by sinister forces who want something from him. Like Squid Game, The Prisoner beguiles the viewer by turning traditional symbols of familiar, homegrown calm (in this case, an idyllic seaside town) into disorientating weapons that keep the characters on a knife's edge. If you want more social criticism: 3% In this Brazilian dystopian thriller, a future society has been cleanly but not equally divided between the impoverished 'Inland' and affluent 'Offshore' world, and 20-year-olds can attempt the arduous 'Process' in order to protect themselves for life—only 3% of applicants succeed. As is the case in Squid Game, the aspirational 'players' are well-defined and emotionally-driven, and it's exciting to watch them battle the intellectual and physical challenges of The Process—but why are they pitted against each other in the first place? If you want more games: Alice in Borderland Based on a manga first published in 2010, this survival sci-fi series debuted on Netflix only nine months before Squid Game. In a parallel universe version of Tokyo, a band of young people are forced to compete in sadistic games modeled on the suites in a deck of cards. Led by Tao Tsuchiya and Kento Yamazaki, Alice in Borderland's characters survive the puzzles and battles with logic and agility—and like Squid Game, a third season is releasing on Netflix in 2025.
Time Magazine
an hour ago
- Time Magazine
In Its Final Season, 'Squid Game' Is Back to Its Brutal Best
If you have a low threshold for spoilers, you might want to save this review for after you've watched Squid Game Season 3. There is an exquisitely devastating episode early in the third and final season of Squid Game. For almost all of its hourlong runtime,'The Starry Night' follows contestants darting around a multi-floor indoor maze of hallways and locked rooms, its ceilings painted deep blue with yellow stars like an elementary school mural, playing a lethal game of hide-and-seek. Half of the players are given knives and told they'll be eliminated if they don't kill at least one person from the other group, who get keys that open some of the doors as a sort of head start. It's a simple setup, but it makes for superb television. More than ever before, we see characters making individual decisions to kill and die; just about everyone comes out a murderer, a hero, a corpse, or some combination of the three. This is the kind of episode that will surely thrill fans and inspire recappers to dissect the ethical and emotional dimensions of each unthinkable choice. That, at least, was my reaction. Then I pressed play on the following episode and was embarrassed to see the VIPs—oh yes, they're back, those monstrous and awkward masked elites who listlessly spectate the last few Squid Games on site—voicing some of the same observations that had occurred to me. Yikes. Welcome to the exhilaratingly brutal last chapter of Squid Game, which ensnares viewers with characters and storylines we can't help but care about, then implicates us for treating a sadistic spectacle as entertainment. There's no underestimating the harm Netflix did to Squid Game by merchandising this dark satire of capitalism into consumerist oblivion, then delaying its conclusion with a second season that was mostly filler. But I'm pleased to report that writer, director, and executive producer Hwang Dong-hyuk has wrested his creation from more cynical hands. Despite all the indignities to which it's been subjected, the show closes with its most unsparing season yet, an indictment of societies where money trumps humanity that roots out all forms of complicity—especially our own. The groundwork for these final six episodes was laid in a Season 2 finale that ended just as the plot started moving. (Could the 13 episodes that comprised the show's second and third seasons have been compressed into a single 10- or even eight-part season? Easily, and almost all of the cuts would have come from the first batch.) Our hangdog hero, Squid Game veteran Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), had fomented revolution among some of the players, but that revolution failed, revealing that his ostensible comrade-in-arms, Player 001, was actually the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) and leaving casualties that weigh heavily on his conscience. The aftermath is a crushing return to death games as usual. There's a torturous rendition of jump rope to be played, cash to be won, people to be 'eliminated,' and soon enough, VIPs to entertain. The VIPs were among the most divisive elements of Squid Game's first season, and it's not hard to see why. Suddenly, we had a new cast of live-action cartoons in sparkly animal masks speaking a version of English that sounded pretty stilted to Anglophone ears. Their scenes threw the tone out of whack, adding an element of artifice to a show whose emotionally realistic storytelling balanced out a far-fetched premise. None of the actors playing VIPs is in danger of winning an Emmy. And yet, the VIPs are crucial. On one hand, more than even the Front Man who oversees the awful spectacle, they're the show's ultimate villains—the people who pay for the annual pleasure of watching hundreds of high-concept murders. Yet their role as spectators of and commentators on the stylized death games that we, too, are watching and talking about also makes them a mirror for the audience. In what could be interpreted as a response to Squid Game's emergence as a global phenomenon—albeit one neutered by reality competition spin-offs and child-size Player 456 Halloween costumes—the VIPs' return in the final season emphasizes this uncomfortable identification between viewer and villain. If the VIPs were Season 1's sour note, then in Season 2, slow-moving side plots set among the guards and the search party looking for Squid Game Island provided less jarring but more extensive distractions from the main event. Detective Hwang Jun-ho's (Wi Ha-jun) procedural-like quest to follow Gi-hun back to the island, in hopes of shutting down the abhorrent competition and confronting his brother the Front Man, dominated the first two episodes; once the games began, Jun-ho and his crew mostly drifted around, lost. Meanwhile, a guard, Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young), who'd left her young daughter behind when she defected from North Korea, was putting herself at risk by interfering with her co-workers' organ-harvesting side hustle. By the Season 2 finale, her purpose in the show remained opaque. Season 3 quickens the pace of both stories, though they function mostly as catalysts for the endgame. That endgame is nothing short of gutting. Though we do get the occasional glimpse of hope, it's overshadowed by horror after horror, each revealing a new dimension of Director Hwang's diatribe against greed. This doesn't make Season 3 a rehash of Season 1 but a profound, frequently poignant, and, yes, thrillingly twist-packed deepening of its themes. It is, in particular, an acknowledgment that individual heroes, burdened by conscience and a disproportionately low share of resources, can only do so much in the face of systemic evil. As one wise character laments to Gi-hun: 'Bad people do bad things, but they blame others and go on to live in peace. Good people, on the other hand, beat themselves up about the smallest things.' To pretend a Squid Game victory could be anything but pyrrhic would be to accept a fairy tale written by the worst people on the planet. The only true victory would be a victory over Squid Game. So, Hwang is asking, when will the millions of us watching impotently from the sidelines join the Gi-huns of the world?
Time Magazine
an hour ago
- Time Magazine
The Real-Life Inspirations Behind Squid Game's VIPs
Squid Game mostly follows its desperate contestants: members of the poor and working class who opt into a series of deadly games for a slim chance at getting out from under capitalism's boot. While the most cutthroat of these Player characters can become targets of audience ire, Hwang Dong-hyuk's mirror for late-stage capitalism makes it clear where the blame for bloodshed truly lies: with a cabal of uber-wealthy people, known as the VIPs. First introduced in the seventh episode of Season 1, aptly titled 'V.I.P.S,' this group is made up of six disgustingly rich English-speaking men, who watch the Game's final rounds in person. The first season VIPs were described to the actors hired to portray them as 'total idiots' and 'dirtbag millionaires,' and the characters live up to those descriptions. The mask-wearing egotists are pampered at every turn by the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) and the Game's workers as they bet on the Players' lives like they are horses in a race. The VIPs are led by Oh Il-nam, who earned his own massive fortune as a moneylender. In Season 1, Oh Il-nam enters himself in the Game as Player 001 as a way to pass the time while he dies from a terminal illness. On his comfy deathbed, Oh Il-nam tells Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) that he originally pitched the idea of the Game because he was bored. In Season 3, which brings Squid Game to an end on June 27, the VIPs take on a more significant role as their moral degradation reaches new lows. 'They take their masks off and go into the game and kill others with their own hands,' Hwang tells TIME, through an interpreter, referring to the characters' arrival in Episode 3. This time, they temporarily trade their dinner dress and opulent animal masks for the soldiers' signature pink suits and black masks, and swap their champagne glasses for machine guns to hunt down and kill the round's 'losers' themselves. Unlike Season 1, this group of VIPs are not afraid to unmask themselves and reveal their identities. For the Squid Game creator, the VIPs' more active Season 3 role stems from his real-world observations. 'In the past, those that really controlled the system and maintained power, they were hidden behind the curtain, almost like this big unseen conspiracy. However, it's no longer the case, especially in America," Hwang says. "We talk a lot about oligarchy these days, but these so-called big tech owners, they step up, telling everyone who they're backing with their money. The people who really control the power and the system, they no longer hide behind a curtain. They willingly take their masks off, almost as if to declare, 'We're the ones running everything. We're the ones in control.'' In 2020, when the first season of Squid Game was filmed, the world had about 2,000 billionaires, worth roughly $8 trillion. In 2025, that number has risen to over 3,000, worth over $16 trillion. (For reference, one million seconds is about 11.5 days, while one billion seconds is about 31.5 years.) Collectively, these billionaire humans have more wealth than the GDP of any country in the world, save for the U.S. or China. Elon Musk's current net worth of $412 billion is bigger than the GDPs of all but 24 countries, including Denmark, Iran, and Malaysia. The lavish Venice wedding of Jeff Bezos, the fourth-richest person in the world, is set to take place the same weekend as Squid Game Season 3's release on Netflix. The private event costs at least an estimated $46 million and has reportedly necessitated the use of around 90 private jets for the transport of its guests. While Hwang didn't base Squid Game's VIP characters on any real people, that doesn't mean they don't resemble members of the increasingly powerful billionaire class. After finishing Season 1, Hwang noted that one of the VIPs unintentionally resembled Donald Trump, the richest person to ever be president of the United States. A similar realization happened after crafting Season 3. 'Elon Musk is everywhere these days, right?' notes Hwang, of the world's richest person and Trump's top campaign donor. 'Everybody talks about him. Not only is he the head of a huge tech company that controls the world almost, but he's also this showman. After writing [Season 3], of course I thought, 'Oh, some of the VIPs do kind of resemble Elon Musk.'' How real-world political polarization inspired Squid Game Season 3 In a better reality, Hwang would have less inspiration for Squid Game. The series was famously inspired by the director's own struggles following the 2008 financial crisis, and the broader infrastructure of growing wealth inequality: the cryptocurrency boom, the rise of tech giants, and Donald Trump's first presidency. Since the release of Squid Game's first season, things have arguably gotten worse. The consolidation of wealth amongst a miniscule fraction of the Earth's population continues, contributing to the conditions for the global rise of facism. 'All around the world, including in European countries, we see extreme right-wing [movements] taking power,' says Hwang. 'We see a continued divide due to political views. In Korea recently, we had former president Yoon [Suk-yeol] declare martial law. He was impeached, but there are very strong, extreme supporters who believe that all of our elections have been rigged. All of these things are leading to exacerbated social conflict and division.' Hwang was also shaken by the deadly events of January 6, 2021, which saw a mob of Trump supporters storm the Capital following the president's loss in the 2020 election. The insurrection was egged on by Trump himself. 'America is known for its liberal democracy,' he says, 'and to see just how intense of a divide elections and voting and political views can put people in… that was very shocking, honestly, so that was also part of the current events that inspired me.' We see this theme of global polarization explored in Squid Game through a ramping up of the in-Game voting process in Seasons 2 and 3. Between every round, the surviving Players cast their votes. Those who vote 'X' want the Game to end, and for the remaining Players to divide the accumulated prize money equally. Those who vote 'O' want to keep playing. In Squid Game, the limits of voting and democracy within a society of such extreme inequality are made clear, as the terms have been set by those in power. The set-up encourages two factions who increasingly dislike and fear one another. The Players are left to fight among themselves, while ignoring the VIPs who enjoy unfettered luxury without having to ever 'play' at all. In the season's penultimate episode, during the Game's final round, the surviving contestants take a vote on which Player to kill next. Their options include a baby, whom they see as an easy target. 'Let's vote on who should get eliminated, and keep it democratic,' one Player says to another, as if they are not talking about murder. 'In the past, through elections, while there were obviously always conflicts based on your political views, at least we all looked at one future together and we had a certain level of tolerance,' says Hwang. 'I don't think that is the case anymore. We no longer think that our views are different. We think that the other view is wrong, and only my view is right. Seeing all of these things happen around the world and in a world where so much of our news and our so-called knowledge is based on algorithms and AI-generated news, I thought that it is time for us to beg the question: Are elections still a very effective system?'
