Everyone’s favorite deadly South Korean game show series is back! Squid Game season 2 is all set to premiere, and creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has been on a press tour drumming up support. He’s been asked a lot of questions, but one sticks out the most. What famous figure would win on Squid Game?
Dong-hyuk was at the Squid Game premiere event in L.A., when People asked him that very question. Interestingly, Dong-hyuk picked an Avenger. Not just any Avenger, mind you. The Avenger. The OG. The one that started it all. That’s right: Iron Man.
Not Iron Man as he is. A Squid Game competition with Iron Man in his suit would hardly be fair, and when people started getting shot and killed he would raze the place to the ground.
“Iron Man — without the suit,” Hwang said. He is of course referring to Tony Stark, one of the absolute geniuses of the Marvel Universe. Hwang thinks Stark is so smart, tough and resourceful that he would have the best chance at making a go at the games.
The first season of the show was a surprise smash back in 2021. The show has a global audience of 330 million, and it’s racked up more than 2.8 billion hours of views. Hwang Dong-hyuk originally said he wasn’t going to make a second season of the show.
“Honestly, after we had been done with Season 1, I had no intention of doing a second season, because the overall process of writing, producing and directing the series was so challenging, I didn’t think to do another one,” he told Variety.
However, once he started working on the story a second season turned into a third. The “immense success” of the show and the adoration from fans worldwide gave him the courage and motivation to keep going with the story.
“To be quite honest, it was because Season 1 was so widely loved by so many people,” Hwang said. In his daily life, he said he got asked constantly about whether the show would move forward. Because of its ambiguous ending (with Gi-hun not boarding the flight), “many people wanted to see the story further unfold.”
So what does season 2 have in store, besides lacking Robert Downey Jr.? There are going to be some new deadly games for contestants to contend with, he said. The first season saw 456 contestants play very real versions of kids games like red light, green light; hopscotch; tug of war and marbles.
“There were some [games] left over from the list of games that I had thought of for season 1,” Dong-hyuk said. “So at least for season 2, it wasn’t as hard to come up with the new games.”
The hardest game for Dong-hyuk personally, he said, would be the honeycomb challenge, where people have to carve the outline of the shape out of a hard cookie. The trick Seong used in the show, where he licked it to make it easier to manipulate, was one Dong-hyuk used himself as a child.
The second season of Squid Game premieres on Dec. 26 on Netflix.
Published: Dec 16, 2024 06:04 pm