As you may have noticed, Squid Game has been the internet’s number one obsession for the last month or so, smashing viewership records to dislodge Bridgerton and become the most popular original series in Netflix history.
It wasn’t an instant sensation, though, with the Korean drama failing to crack the Top 10 on the Nielsen streaming ratings during its first weekend, but the latest data reports that the cultural phenomenon was watched by 123 million subscribers in 23 days, with 66% of them binging from start to finish.
A few days ago, word leaked out that Netflix had only paid $21.4 million for Squid Game, which then saw an employee fired for admitting they’d downloaded internal data to share with outside sources. Buried among the findings came the mind-blowing caveat that the company expects the show to generate up to $891 million in what it calls ‘impact value’.
That presumably means merchandise, ad revenue and any other methods that Netflix can use to leverage Squid Game for monetary gain, which shouldn’t be too hard when you consider that nobody’s stopped talking about it. As per Variety, the streamer’s representatives refused to answer when pushed for comment about the potential windfall, which is understandable when they had to terminate the contract of the person who leaked the information in the first place.
