Netflix Takes Victory Lap Through Seoul With Massive ‘Squid Game’ Parade
Could all this really be for one TV show?
On a humid, hazy night in Seoul over the weekend, Netflix staged its most extravagant fan event to date — a full-scale victory parade celebrating the final season of Squid Game, the candy-colored death drama that remains the company’s most-watched title of all time.
Stretching nearly a mile, the spectacle featured over 450 performers, airborne displays of Squid Game iconography, phalanxes of pink-suited guards, a brass marching band blasting the show’s eerie anthems, and a 25-foot-tall Young-hee doll with laser beams shooting from its eyes. The procession began at the city’s historic Gwanghwamun Gate and marched into Seoul Plaza, culminating in a massive fan celebration starring Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk and 25 of the most popular cast members from across the show’s three seasons. Netflix says the event took nearly a year to organize in collaboration with the Seoul Metropolitan Government, and that the crowd surrounding the parade swelled to as many as 38,000.
On the ground in Seoul, the moment felt so improbably outsized that it was hard not to impute broader narratives to the spectacle. Perhaps this was more about Netflix finally throwing itself a victory parade for its decisive triumph over the legacy studios in what was once cringingly referred to as “the streaming wars”? Or, thinking “local first” — as Netflix always does with its international content strategy — maybe the Netflix logo beaming over Seoul City Hall was just the natural end point of a U.S. tech giant’s full-scale takeover of the Korean entertainment industry, coyly disguised as an act of benevolence? At other moments in the evening — which included immersive video projections, star Q&As, dance sequences, an a cappella rendition of the Squid Game theme, and the crowd constantly going nuts — the celebration had the air of a raucous music festival. One where every band and DJ was Squid Game.
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However jaundiced the perspective of the sole trade reporter in attendance, though, the vibe among the stars on stage and the legions of fans who turned out for the party was purely joyous.
“This has been a five- or six-year journey for me and I have so many fond memories,” Lee Jung-jae, who plays Squid Game protagonist Seong Gi-hun, aka Player 456, said from the stage. “I’ve been doing promotion and interviews in many countries [these past weeks], but watching the parade just now, it finally started sinking in that this is the finale and it’s all over,” he said. “I’m very grateful.”
Actor Lee Byung-hun, who plays Squid Game‘s mysterious villain, the Front Man, said he initially signed up for the project believing he would just be shooting a brief cameo to conclude the show’s first season. But after that season became a global phenomenon, he realized his journey was just beginning.
“When seasons two and three were greenlit, I realized I had to dig deep and understand the role — and that’s when I fell in love with this character,” Lee said. And although he’s been one of Korea’s biggest stars for over two decades, Lee said the Netflix hit held special significance in his long career. “Squid Game made history for Korean entertainment and being part of that has been an incredible honor,” he added.
Content creator Brian Skabeche traveled from Mexico to South Korea for Saturday’s event. Once in Seoul, he participated in a contest of Squid Game-themed challenges with over 100 international influencers and won the honor of being among 20 to walk in the parade in Young-hee’s shadow.
“There are people who came here from all over the world and it’s been a fantastic experience,” Skabeche told THR early in the night. “One guy told me he’s here because he likes the anti-capitalist message of Squid Game; other people are just super fans.”
Skabeche said he had never experienced Korean content before Squid Game, but he fell in love with the show while bingeing it with his sister, after she suffered an accident and was stuck at home recovering. “We both got hooked and it became this thing we bonded over,” he said. Later, Skabeche created a YouTube video with his influencer friends of their dogs participating in a mock version of Squid Game. The video was a hit and gave his channel a significant boost.
“It connected me with K-content fans, who I learned are a really great audience,” he said.
The scale of Squid Game’s success is indeed unprecedented. While Korean cinema had been building a cult following since the early 2000s, and K-pop exploded into global view as far back as 2012 with Psy’s satirical smash hit “Gangnam Style,” Squid Game astonished the world when its first season debuted on Netflix in September 2021. The show’s viewership started modestly, then snowballed into an organic regional hit before exploding into a bona fide global phenomenon. Within weeks, it became Netflix’s most-watched show of all time — a title it has never ceded. (Squid Game later also won a pair of Emmys for its creator and star — a first for the Korean industry.)
The show’s creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk, has spoken movingly of his mixed feelings about the way his brutal satire of late-stage capitalism’s rapacious inhumanity has resonated so deeply with viewers around the world.
Netflix, naturally, has only accelerated its investment in Korean entertainment, carving out a decisive leadership position in the country’s premium online video sector ahead of Korea’s top local players. In 2023, the company pledged to invest $2.5 billion in Korean content over four years — more than double the total of all its prior K-content investments. The power of Netflix’s global business model was another undercurrent to Saturday’s Squid Game extravaganza — the kind of spectacle and expenditure that could only make sense for a platform with the potential to leverage localized titles across an international subscriber base stretching into the hundreds of millions (or, several times more than South Korea’s total population of 51 million).
The runaway success of Squid Game’s first season heaped enormous pressure on Hwang, who famously writes and directs every episode singlehandedly. But season two — which took a full three years to make its way back onto global screens — nonetheless delivered, setting a new Netflix record for the most views in a title’s premiere week, and eventually rising to become the platform’s third most-popular show of all time. Squid Game’s fate returned to the audience last Friday, when season three launched worldwide.
“It was a really long journey, and I put my heart and soul into this work,” Hwang told the crowd in Seoul on Saturday. “Now that it’s all over, I have a bittersweet feeling — but I also feel a lot of relief.”
Not long after the director and his cast made their exit, the stage’s huge video monitors flashed a “Game Over” message above the crowd. Whether Squid Game — Netflix’s most valuable piece of IP — is truly over remains to be seen. A mysterious cameo from Cate Blanchett near the end of the finale — alongwith widespread industry chatter about a potential deal for David Fincher to direct a spinoff — would certainly suggest otherwise. For now, Netflix is staying quiet, basking instead in what one imagines as the pink glow of Season 3’s soaring viewership stats.
