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Squid Game
This article was published on 1/2 and republished on 1/3.
While Netflix has established that season 3 of Squid Game is coming in 2025 in multiple promos for its content in the coming year, they may have accidentally let the exact date slip.
Netflix Korea briefly had a video go live that didn’t just have the 2025 release date, but a specific date, June 27, 2025. That would be just six months from now, essentially record time in releasing a new season of a huge show, especially when it took three years to get from season 1 to season 2.
However, if you’ve watched season 2 and heard anything that creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has said about this, you’ll know that this is more or less Part 2 of Season 2, rather than a season 3 in a more traditional sense. Here’s what happened:
“No other particular reason than that I originally envisioned it as a single series, so both seasons two and three as a single series when I was writing it. But then, as I wrote the story along, it became to be too many episodes and too long of a story because you see Gi-hun’s journey where he returns to the game, but also he goes through a revolt, and that is actually the climax of that storyline, where he tries to create an uprising, but then that all goes to failure.”
“And I also saw that aspect of it as yet another game as well, and so I thought that we would divide it into two seasons to have that – Gi-hun’s revolt going into a failure, him ending up losing his best friend, that itself being yet another important climatic event in the first half of the season, so into season two.”
Squid Game
Production on both seasons happened all at once, so part of this three year gap was Hwang making a giant 14 episode arc that was split into two seasons. While Netflix has been doing a “split a new season of a popular series in half” release schedule a lot of the time as of late, that’s usually 4 and 4 or 5 and 5 and a month or so apart. Here, six months apart, with seven hour long episodes each? Sure, I guess I’ll give them the “season 3” badge in this case.
Why so soon? Well, again, I think Netflix knows that people clearly want the cliffhangers of season 2 resolved sooner rather than later, but also the way they’re spacing out content means they probably want the second half of 2025 devoted to its other two massive shows, the final season of Stranger Things, season 5, and season 2 of Wednesday, its two most-watched English series of all time, with Squid Game being its most-watched overall. It is going to be an absolutely huge year for Netflix due to how all this is lining up.
Update (1/3): To lend further credence to this idea that Squid Game season 3 will be released on June 27, we can go to the potential, estimated release dates of Stranger Things season 5 and Wednesday season 2, which I’ve already calculated before this using past filming data extrapolated forward.
- For instance, filming wrapped for Stranger Things season 5 in December 2024. Using past timing for season 4, that should be eight months of post-production, putting the release in August 2025, though with a bigger season, perhaps closer to October 2025, a good distance from Squid Game season 3.
- For Wednesday season 2, there are two main options. Using the same calculation with filming wrapped, the release window is probably somewhere in July 2025, which would be right after Squid Game season 3 airs. However, if Netflix wanted to space the show out more and release it closer to when the first season came out, November 23, 2022, that may be the more likely plan, even if it fully extends the gap between seasons to three years. Fans have waited this long, so what’s a bit more?
My final guess is Squid Game in June, Stranger Things in September/October and Wednesday in November/December of 2025. We’ll see if I’m right, but I do think I’m probably going to end up being pretty close. Regardless, it’s about to be a truly enormous year for Netflix.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
