‘Squid Game’ becomes Netflix’s most successful series launch to date

Los Angeles: According to Netflix, the survival game series ‘Squid Game’ is the most popular TV show ever released on its first day of release.

Variety.com reports that the streaming platform announced on Tuesday that the ultraviolent Korean drama has been watched by 111 million members worldwide since its September 17 premiere, in just 25 days.

This means that ‘Squid Game’ was watched by more people in its first month of release than the previous number one holder, ‘Bridgerton,’ which Netflix said was chosen to watch by 82 million households in its first 28 days of release.

Netflix’s proprietary metric is based on the number of accounts that chose a specific title and streamed it for at least 2 minutes. That doesn’t tell us how many people watched even one full episode, or how many people checked it out to see what all the fuss was about before turning it off.

For the first time, the company recently released a ranking of the top ten most-viewed original shows and films by total hours viewed.

Despite this, ‘Squid Game’ has generated enormous buzz and has consistently ranked as the number one series in the world since its debut, according to Netflix.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO, and the content chief said two weeks ago that the show had a very good chance of becoming the streamer’s biggest show ever.

“In terms of its global popularity, we did not see that coming,” Sarandos said at Vox Media’s Code Conference.

In the show, 456 indebted contestants are mysteriously brought together on an island off the coast of South Korea to compete in children’s games for a massive cash prize with literally life-or-death consequences.

Hwang Dong-hyuk, the series’ creator and director, told Variety that he first had the idea for ‘Squid Game’ as a film in 2008. However, because of its violent themes, Korean studios passed on it, and he went on to create several hit films before being able to revisit the project about ten years later.

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