An Update On The Surprisingly Close ‘Squid Game’ Season 3 Release Date

This article was published on 12/30 and republished on 12/31.

If you’ve watched Squid Game season 2 at this point, you’ll know that it really only feels like half a season with a huge cliffhanger in the middle, and making it through (spoilers) only half of the current games.

But we will not have to wait another three years for season 3, thankfully, as both Netflix and creator Hwang Dong-hyuk have ensured that won’t happen by having no production breaks between seasons. The result is a season 3 of Squid Game that is much, much closer than we think.

We’ve previously heard a “2025” launch window, though that could have meant Christmas, a full year break. But now Hwang Dong-hyuk is saying that it’s closer, and might even potentially be just a half year until Squid Game returns. Here’s the window he’s giving when he was asked about a season 3 release date by Variety:

“At this point, anything I might say is going to be a spoiler, so I want to be cautious. But what I can say is, after Season 2 launches, I believe we will be announcing the launch date for Season 3 soon. I probably expect that to launch around summer or fall next year. But as for the storyline of the third season, Gi-hun having lost everything, including his best friend, and all of his attempts going to failure, it’s now, what is he going to be like? What state is Gi-hun going to be in? And what will he choose to do? Will he continue on with the mission? Is he going to give up or persist? And so you’re going to meet our character Gi-hun at a very critical crossroads as we begin the third season. Gi-hun will not be the man he was in Season 2.”

Early summer would be six months, very late fall would be closer to 11 months, if it’s November, but somewhere in the middle we can split the difference at maybe 8 or 9. Regardless, it is way outside the norm for Netflix to do literal yearly seasons, much less new seasons of a show coming in under a year. But it’s clear Squid Game season 2 and 3 are different cases, really just one very long season broken in half.

And yes, it was very much broken, one of the aspects that didn’t quite work with season 2 (spoilers follow). The two B and C plotlines about the cop finding the island and the guard interfering with an organ harvesting operation were built up all season but barely actually went anywhere, no doubt only paying off when season 3 gets here. And in season 1, we got through all six games in nine episodes. Here, we only got through three in seven episodes, and yes, it seems exceedingly likely all three will be played in season 3. At least we won’t have to wait that long.

Update (12:31): There are some interesting quotes on why Hwang Dong-hyuk decided to break up seasons 2 and 3 like this, given that season 2 feels like half a season with a whole litany of cliffhangers that are kind of frustrating once the finale airs. Spoilers follow.

“No other particular reason than that I originally envisioned it as a single series, so both seasons two and three as a single series when I was writing it. But then, as I wrote the story along, it became to be too many episodes and too long of a story because you see Gi-hun’s journey where he returns to the game, but also he goes through a revolt, and that is actually the climax of that storyline, where he tries to create an uprising, but then that all goes to failure.”

“And I also saw that aspect of it as yet another game as well, and so I thought that we would divide it into two seasons to have that – Gi-hun’s revolt going into a failure, him ending up losing his best friend, that itself being yet another important climatic event in the first half of the season, so into season two.”

This seems like a case where this was not actually a Netflix-mandated decision, as recently they have been splitting seasons of returning popular shows in half. Rather, here there were just too many episodes, likely another seven at an hour or more each, and Netflix does not air 14 episode, 14 hours seasons like, ever. But they also clearly did not want to wait three years for this story to be finished, so it will work at least more similarly to one of its traditional “breaks,” albeit with a 6-12 month gap rather than a 1-2 month one the way many 10 episode seasons are split.

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