Squid Game season three breaks Netflix viewership record
Over its first three days, there have been over 60.1m views, a new high for the streamer with over 368.4m hours viewed. The second season launched with 68m views but over a four-day period last December.
It has already become the ninth biggest non-English language season ever with the first and second seasons occupying the top two slots.
Reviews have been mixed to positive with the Guardian's Rebecca Nicholson calling it 'nowhere near as pointed as it was' in previous seasons.
While this has been called the final season, David Fincher has been rumoured to be developing an English language remake for the streamer. The director has worked with Netflix before on political drama series House of Cards, film industry biopic Mank and Michael Fassbender action thriller The Killer. Earlier this year, it was announced that he would work with them once again to direct a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood based on a script by Quentin Tarantino.
The streamer has already found success with competition spin-off Squid Game: The Challenge with a second season on the way.
When asked about future Squid Game projects, series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told Variety that he hadn't heard anything official yet about a remake.
'If they wanted to do a following season, then I think it's obvious I would have to participate and lead,' he said. 'But if it's the US version that they're making, I think sharing of ideas would be enough. I have no intention of being completely hands-on in a project like that. Having said that, if Netflix asks and if I feel like my contribution is needed, then as long as it's not something that would interfere with whatever I'm working on at that time, I would be happy to provide what they need from me.'
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The Indian movie legend on a cut-price mission to save Bollywood
About ten years ago, Aamir Khan became troubled. Despite being one of Bollywood's most bankable superstars for more than three decades, he realised that only tiny numbers of Indians were watching him on the big screen. Indian cinema is widely adored and has an outsized influence on society but just 2-3% of its 1.4 billion people go to the cinema. One longstanding problem is access, in particular in rural areas. Khan, who has starred in, directed and produced celebrated films including Lagaan, 3 Idiots and Taare Zameen Par, spent years trying to develop a plan to build thousands of low-cost cinemas in India's rural hinterland where films could be beamed in via satellite. However, the initiative was stymied by relentless bureaucracy. Cost, too, has become a big obstacle. In the past, going to the cinema was a vibrant, often rowdy communal affair, where families would pack out single-screen cinemas amid cheering, dancing and whistling, with tickets costing just a few rupees. But as multiplexes have come to dominate in India, it has become a luxury experience. Tickets now regularly cost upwards of 500 rupees (£4.30) – unaffordable to most families in India. 'When my first film came out the cinema tickets were 10 rupees and whole families from all classes could afford to come [and] pack out cinema halls,' said Khan, 60. 'But the reality is that theatres are no longer a mass medium, it's become an upper-class medium. And as film-makers, we haven't done enough to change that and reach that other 97% of the population.' Instead, he said people had found other ways to watch films: either waiting for them to come on to satellite television or watching grainy pirated versions on their phones. This week, however, Khan presented what he promised would be the solution – or what he described as the 'future for Indian cinema'. After a traditional cinematic run, his latest release, Sitaare Zameen Par (Stars on Earth), will be made available for audiences exclusively on YouTube for just 100 rupees, the equivalent of less than £1. Other films in his back catalogue and future releases will follow. His choice of YouTube, known more as a place to watch trailers than full movies, was deliberate. Of all entertainment platforms, YouTube's reach in India – with 491 million users – far outstretches other traditional streaming services such as Netflix, which has about 12 million subscribers in India. It was, said Khan, 'an absolute no-brainer when you consider the reach it has'. 'Internet penetration in India is now huge so you don't need physical theatres to reach an audience any more,' Khan said. 'I believe this is the model that will reach out to the maximum number of people and also serve the film industry's creative community. Of course, the first place for our films should always be theatres. But then they should be available to the bulk of the country at an affordable price.' Khan said he would always prefer people to watch his films on the big screen but the reality was that theatres were not catering to the audience he wanted to reach. He said: 'The idea with this is that 100 rupees would be paid by a whole family to watch the film together, maybe with their neighbours as well, so the cost per head would be very low.' Khan's decision to offer an alternative is also a response to the detrimental role he believes streaming has played in the crisis being faced by Indian cinema. Sign up to Film Weekly Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters after newsletter promotion Rather than boosting audiences, streaming had proved 'counterproductive' and had led to the 'cannibalisation' of Indian cinema, where films barely had a chance to be seen at theatres before they became absorbed on a platform alongside millions of others. 'Right now I feel that cinema is going through a rough time and I'm doing what I can to put back life into it,' said Khan. The industry's turmoil has not been restricted to a flailing box office. Over the past decade, since right-wing Hindu nationalist politics have come to dominate India, film-makers have accused India's film censors of being draconian and blocking anything politically contentious. Bollywood's biggest male stars – Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan, often referred to as the 'trinity of Khans' – are all Muslim and have been targeted by nationalists, who have mobilised hate campaigns and boycotts of their films and accused them of being 'anti-India'. Khan continues to be haunted by comments he made a decade ago, stating that he felt unsafe amid 'rising intolerance', which prompted protests. Khan acknowledged that many in the industry felt their creative instincts were being curbed by people in positions of strength who know very little about mass communication. 'They feel they don't have the freedom to say things the way they want to and how they want to,' he said. But Khan said censorship and other pressures faced by Indian cinema were nothing new and dated back to the 1940s. 'Every society has a certain percentage of people who are negative in their outlook and that is not going to disappear.' Despite entertaining thoughts of retirement – as well as a brief period during the pandemic when he 'secretly retired for six months' – Khan said he remained excited by the possibilities of cinema in India. 'I'm really hopeful this new model will work,' he said. 'If it doesn't, we're all in trouble.'
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
How KPop Demon Hunters became the surprise Netflix smash of the summer
School is out, young audiences are available, and yet still, Hollywood animation is having a bad summer at the box office. In contrast to last year, when Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 occupied two of the season's top three (and combined for about $2.7bn worldwide), it seems entirely possible that not a single fully animated movie will crack the top 10. Adding insult to injury: the Disney-Pixar original Elio has been trounced by 'live-action' remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, which faithfully reproduce old cartoons with bland new actors and CG visual effects. With younger audiences steered toward those movies and seemingly also welcomed into big-tent hits like Superman and Jurassic World: Rebirth, it's all the more remarkable that Netflix has somehow managed to have its biggest animated movie ever. 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But even after poaching film-makers from major animation studios, the streamers have struggled with original material; Netflix's The Sea Beast isn't anywhere near as good as Moana, with which it shares a co-director, and its Over the Moon (the directorial debut of Glen Keane, a longtime Disney animator) is downright ghastly. Spellbound, from Skydance's attempt to start their own animation house led by the disgraced former Pixar honcho John Lasseter, arrived with barely a peep last Thanksgiving. Most of the time, the Netflix charts are dominated by older animated titles from established studios like DreamWorks and Illumination. So why did KPop Demon Hunters break through? Maybe it helps that it isn't an in-house Netflix production; the movie was actually produced by Sony Pictures Animation, the studio that worked such genre-bending magic with the Spider-Verse movies. KPop isn't quite as ambitiously style-forward as that series, but it shares the same basic visual approach of intentionally choppy but eye-catching, shapeshifting animation that imitates both comic-book splash pages and anime, splattered in purple and pink hues. It's not clear when Sony decided they would pursue a streaming release, but Netflix previously distributed the similarly manic (and original) The Mitchells vs the Machines when the pandemic delayed its planned theatrical release. The Netflix-Sony cartoons seem to indicate that maybe there's more cultural cachet in standing out from the animation crowd, rather than doing off-brand versions of Disney-style songs and Pixar-style secret worlds. In particular, KPop Demon Hunters seems freer to capitalize on a cultural trend than its mainstream competition. Disney has become so self-conscious about its own iconography that its last non-sequel in-house animated feature, Wish, was an extended 100th-anniversary celebration for its parent company, packed with references to their animated classics. Their big release for this fall is Zootopia 2, a stringing out from a great original idea they debuted almost a decade ago. The other big US animation houses are similarly sequel-fixated; the last big animated release of the summer is The Bad Guys 2, from DreamWorks. Not only is KPop Demon Hunters not a sequel, nor even a comics adaptation, it feels engaged with a world outside of its parent company, no matter how heightened its wild fantasy action becomes. By making the central characters a K-pop group, the movie finds something that breaks the princess/talking animal/scrappy kid hegemony. It's about young-adult characters with major responsibilities (even if those responsibilities involve the equally fantastical pop-girlie grind and Buffy-esque demon-fighting), carried out with an aspirational big-sister energy that younger kids can watch with wide-eyed admiration usually reserved for Disney princesses. American interest in K-pop may have even peaked; technically, the optimal time for this movie might have been circa 2021 – not coincidentally, the year the movie's production was announced. But though KPop Demon Hunters has some adult themes and scary monsters, it's also pitched young enough that it's almost better-equipped than if it had come at the height of the BTS craze. The movie very much repackages K-pop for an even-broader audience of native English speakers (something K-pop itself has been doing for years at this point) in a way that draws from the trend's fandom without relying exclusively on it. Demon Hunters also constructs a fantasy version of the pop machine, particularly the astonishing levels of training received by a lot of K-pop acts; here, all the girls' hard work is entirely at the behest of their own artistic vision, and they rise-and-grind off the couch voluntarily, not because a music label is forcing them. It's probably no accident that the lower reaches of the movie's audience are probably also discovering their own music for the first time – and making their preferences known on the charts, as a whopping nine songs from KPop Demon Hunter are currently on the Billboard Hot 100. That closeness to the pop world also allows the movie to make pop stars its dauntless heroines and devious villains all at once. (The demons disguised as a boy band sing an infectious ditty called Soda Pop that even the movie's demon-savvy characters can't really resist.) So much pop taste formation involves sussing out what you find irresistible versus what you find deeply annoying, two qualities that can reverse themselves with surprising ease. Even if KPop Demon Hunters is ultimately more about self-acceptance and friendship than the dynamics of pop music, it's letting a younger audience try out pop fandom. In that way, it welcomes those viewers into the kind of faux-grownup world that they often get from PG-13 live-action superhero movies. As with superheroes, the response to this movie's success will mostly be 'make sequels to this specific movie, forever' with a possible dash of 'streaming animation is really happening this time!' It shouldn't be, though. In the wake of so many sequels from Disney, Pixar, Illumination and DreamWorks, KPop Demon Hunters is a reminder that kids in particular hunger for novelty, probably more so than their nostalgia-drunk adult counterparts. 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Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Jenna Ortega channels her inner Wednesday Addams in an eery gothic dress as she attends Paris premiere for the Netflix hit's second season
Jenna Ortega channeled her inner Wednesday Addams in a distressed gothic dress as attended the Paris premiere for the Netflix 's hit's second season in the French capital on Thursday. In the show, she plays the wily yet reserved protagonist who always manages to keep her cool under pressure. And Jenna channelled her starring character as she stepped out in a brown floor-length gown which featured a daringly high slit. Her gown featured a ruffled lining around the plunging neckline as she showcased her petite frame with a matching belt. She added inched to her statuesque frame as the actress slipped into a pair of towering brown platform heels. To accessorise, she kept in theme with her gothic ensemble as she wore an oversized cross necklace. The gothic comedy, which follows the antics of Wednesday Addams (played by Jenna), debuted on the streaming service in November 2022. It was quickly renewed for a second series in January 2023. It is one in a series of takes over the years on The Addams Family, the eccentric fictional old-money clan, famously macabre and gothic in manner and look. The second series of the Emmy-winning programme, executive produced and often directed by horror icon Tim Burton, 66, is set for release on 6 August 2025. And now, it has been announced that not only will Wednesday be back for a third series, but a spin-off programme is currently under discussion, according to Hollywood Reporter. Fans were delighted to hear the fate of the beloved show has been secured, taking to social media to express their excitement. Catherine Zeta-Jones posted on Instagram confirming the news: 'When Wednesday comes a better day. 'Wednesday season three. It's official... we shall return.' Her gown featured a ruffled lining around the plunging neckline as she showcased her petite frame with a matching belt One fan wrote in the comments section: 'And for many more seasons.'; 'I love this because then they can start filming soon and it won't be such a long pause between seasons! Or that's the hope!' The second series was announced in January 2023, but by the time it comes out later this year, it will have been more than two years in the making. The first series of Wednesday follows the titular troublemaker character after she is expelled and transferred to Nevermore Academy, a school for monstrous outcasts. Her cool, creepy manner and rebellious streak often see her in trouble and struggling to fit in. But after she discovers she is a psychic like her mother and applies her skills to solving a local murder case, she soon finds her stride. The programme boasts an impressive regular cast, with Game of Thrones' Gwendoline Christie and Narcos' Luis Guzman also starring. They feature as Nevermore headteacher Larissa Weems and Wednesday's father, Gomez Addams, respectively. The upcoming second series looks to be even more star-studded, with Lady Gaga, Joanna Lumley, Steve Buscemi, and Thandiwe Newton also joining the cast. Star Jenna and director Tim also worked together on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the 2024 sequel to the original 1988 horror film starring Winona Ryder. And they have now told all about what fans can expect from the upcoming second series and the newly announced third instalment. Scream queen Jenna, who rose to fame in slashers Scream, X and Scream VI, was embroiled in controversy in recent months for comments she made during a podcast interview. She said she spent her time on the show 'changing lines' and 'had to put my foot down' because 'everything I had to play did not make sense for the character'. Jenna said she felt terrible about this and never meant it that way, simply meaning to say she improvised a lot and was permitted to. Tim sympathised with her, feeling the comments had been interpreted in a way she had not meant. But the pair revealed that after these events, Jenna is now a producer on the show. Co-creator Alfred Gough, who made the show with Miles Millar, said this made sense, as she is already so involved in every part of the show, as well as giving notes on the script, in a way he praised. Wednesday's first series pulled in a whopping 252million viewers globally, making it Netflix's biggest English-language series of all time. Alfred has now teased a spin-off: 'It's something we're definitely noodling; there are other characters we can look at.' Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria, meanwhile, added: 'There's a lot to explore in the Addams Family.' New cast member Joanna Lumley previously told Netflix news site Tudum: 'There's always something thrilling about working for Tim Burton. 'His whole mind takes him to a different world, and the world that they've created here for Wednesday and Nevermore and the family is just intoxicating. 'It's wonderful. I get to wear many, many huge wigs, one on top of the other — and lots of quite constraining clothes, so I love it.'
