SQUID GAME HAS BECOME THE MOST POPULAR NETFLIX SERIES EVER

Netflix says squid game is already its most watched show ever, 111 million households have sampled the South Korean survival drama.

Squid Game's success underscores Netflix's continued focus on getting local-language shows to find international fan bases.

Squid Game, the bloody survival series that has been at the top of Netflix's Top 10 list in the U.S. since it premiered in September, is now the streaming service's most-watched series yet, the company said Tuesday.

According to Netflix, 111 million subscriber households have opted to at least sample the South Korean drama since it premiered on the service on Sept. 17. The series, in which indebted contestants are forced. to compete against one another in twisted kill-or-be-killed games, has become a global phenomenon, and Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said in late September that the show was on track to be the streamer's most popular release ever.

But that hefty number comes, as usual, with a big caveat: since early 2020, Netflix has defined a "view" as when a subscribing household has opted to watch just two minutes of a program, making viewership impossible to compare to traditional TV ratings (which are calculated on average number of viewers per minute) and difficult to parse against other programs on different platforms.

But among Netflix's other series that are measured using the same yardstick, Squid Game has them beat. Bridgerton, Shonda Rhimes' steamy (and decidedly much less violent) period drama that premiered on Dec. 25, was previously Netflix's most

popular series ever, with 82 million households tuning in to watch the series in four weeks' time.

Squid Game's success is the first time that a South Korean series has found this level of success on Netflix, and its success came as somewhat of a surprise for Netflix. Speaking at Vox Media's Code Conference, Sarandos admitted that Netflix "did not see that coming in terms of (Squid Game's) global popularity."

But it's the second huge local-language series that has performed extraordinarily well on Netflix despite long-standing industry assumptions that series requiring subtitles for many viewers may dampen interest. Lupin, a French-language series inspired by the iconic literary gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, was previously the most-popular local language series on the platform, with 76 million member households watching at least two minutes of the program in four weeks' time.

With more than 209 million subscribers around the world, Netflix executives are focused not just on investing, but have underscored the importance of figuring out how to make local-language programming travel well to other markets, which can help certain markets while satisfying international audiences.

"The one thing that we really have done, really sharpened our skills on the last couple of years, has been creating content from anywhere in the world and playing it all over the world," Sarandos told investors earlier this year. "Our ability to do this around the world at scale and being able to bring those stories to a big global audience is something that we're really incredibly proud of and we'll keep working on over the next couple of years."

In just 17 days after release, a total of 111 million Netflix subscribers around the world watched Squid Game, surpassing Bridgerton, which was watched by 82 million people in 28 days