By Danielle Broadway
(Reuters) – The popular South Korean drama “Squid Game” will return to Netflix on June 27 for a third and final season, the streaming platform announced during its “Next on Netflix” event on Thursday.
The event also featured a short clip from the upcoming season, which reveals yet another tension-filled scene from within the games.
The survival thriller action series turned into a global sensation in 2021, bolstering Netflix’s subscription numbers and becoming the streaming service’s most-watched original series in its first month.
Netflix reported that 142 million households had watched the dark drama about people who compete in a deadly competition to erase financial debt.
The return of “Squid Game,” together with high-profile live events such as the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match and two National Football League games on Christmas Day, helped Netflix add a record 19 million subscribers in its fourth quarter, to bring its total global subscriber base to nearly 302 million.
The third season will be the last installment of the series, which was developed for television by Korean writer and producer Hwang Dong-hyuk. The story will once again follow Lee Jung-jae as the protagonist Seong Gi-hun, who is determined to stop the dystopian games.
“Squid Game” is one of a trio of popular series returning to Netflix this year. The supernatural drama “Stranger Things” returns for a fifth and final installment, and the Addams Family-inspired series, “Wednesday,” is back for its second season.
“Stranger Things” creators Matt and Ross Duffer said they shot more than 650 hours of footage for the final season, but told members of the press gathered Wednesday for Netflix’s annual showcase of films, series and games that there would be more stories to tell.
“With more than 700 million people watching, we can’t just be one thing,” Netflix Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria said. “We need to be the best version of everything.”
Other highlights of the showcase included footage of Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Guillermo del Toro’s new film, “Frankenstein,” which reanimates Mary Shelley’s classic tale.
“This film has been on my mind since I was a child – for fifty years,” Guillermo said in videotaped remarks. “And I’ve been trying to make it for 20 to 25 years.”
Ben Affleck touted a drama, “RIP,” teaming up once again with Matt Damon, this time in a crime thriller inspired by true events, set in Florida.
Stand-up comedian John Mulaney will return to Netflix on March 12 for a weekly live late-night show, “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney,” which will run for 12 weeks.
“We will be live globally with no delay. We will never be relevant. We will never be your source for news. We will always be reckless,” Mulaney said.
“30 Rock” creator Tina Fey will adapt Alan Alda’s 1981 big-screen romantic comedy, “The Four Seasons,” as an eight-episode comedy series, in which she will appear alongside co-stars Steve Carell, Will Forte, Kerri Kinney-Silver, Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani.
(Reporting by Danielle Broadway and Dawn Chmielewski; Editing by Sonali Paul)
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