Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk is returning with another Korean crime drama

Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk will be back, but not with another season of the deadliest game.

Hwang is in production on a new series called The Dealer, and it sounds like he’s not veering too far, at least thematically, from the global phenomenon that made him a household name, and supercharged South Korean pop culture on a global scale.

The Dealer is being billed as a drama set within the shady world of casinos – another high-stakes arena in which often-desperate humans make poor choices playing games and gambling with their lives.

The crime drama will centre on a character called Geonhwa (Jung So-min), a former dealer who returns to the casino and the associated underworld after she falls victim to a fraud. She has certain “capabilities” that gives her an advantage but which she has previously concealed.

There’s also a character described as a struggling gambler who is drawn into Geonhwa’s plot, plus a casino competitor, and Geonhwa’s fiancé, a gentle police detective.

Hwang is a producer on the show, which also stars Ryoo Seung-bum, Lee Soo-hyuk and Ryu Kyung-soo. It is being made by Firstman Studio, the production outfit behind Squid Game, and Netflix.

Squid Game remains Netflix’s most-watched original series of all time, its first season having clocked up 265 million views in the first three months after release, according to the streamer’s own metric.

When the series premiered in September 2021, it dominated global pop culture, an unusual occurrence for a non-English language title.

It became a huge hit thanks to the distinctive visuals of its production design, the thrilling premise of the show’s story about a competition in which indebted individuals played children’s games for a shot at a $50 million cash prize, the consequences (death) if you lost, and its scathing commentary on dehumanising capitalist social structures.

Three years after its release, Squid Game returned for a second and third season, which was divisive among audiences. One of the common criticisms was there didn’t need to be a follow-up to a perfectly formed limited series.

However, you could hardly blame Hwang for making more instalments. Undoubtedly, given Squid Game’s success, Netflix would have put the pressure on, and while seasons two and three were not universally critically acclaimed like their predecessor, they still generated 192 million and 145 million views, respectively.

That made them Netflix’s third and fourth most watched seasons of all time among its TV originals.

It also enabled Hwang to share in the financial success of his show.

For the first season of the series, Hwang was paid according to the terms of his original contract, he told The Guardian in 2021. Which means, Hwang was not a paid any bonuses or residuals for the show’s gargantuan popularity.

Hwang had spent over a decade developing Squid Game and had, by that point, being rejected by all the Korean studios. He told The Wall Street Journal his financial situation at one point had become so dire he was living with his mother and grandmother and had sold his laptop for a few hundred dollars.

He wasn’t in a position to leverage a cushy contract for that first season, which reportedly cost an estimated $30 million to make but had generated more than a billion dollars in value for Netflix.

If the next two seasons was just about getting Hwang, now in a much better bargaining position, compensated given how much money he made for Netflix, then can you really object to that?

Especially when you consider Netflix owns the rights to Hwang’s creation, and the first thing it did after Squid Game blew up was to make a reality TV version of the competition, the existence of which is anathema to everything the series was trying to say about greed, exploitation and brutalisation.