Netflix’s gruesome, ratings-smashing (fictional) competition will soon be back in play, and as this new poster for Squid Game season two teases, “the game will not stop.” Its players, of course, are frequently stopped—forever, and in hideous ways—when they fail in whatever twisted challenge gets thrown at them.
Season one’s Player 392 met his end after failing to carve the proper shape from his honeycomb during “The Man With the Umbrella” episode; whoever wears the number this round looks to be meeting his own grim elimination. First-look pictures from season two suggest that Lee Jung-jae’s winning protagonist, Seong Gi-hun, will once again be Player 456 when he returns to the battlefield.
Here’s the official synopsis of season two, which is tantalizingly vague: “Three years after winning Squid Game, Player 456 gave up going to the states and comes back with a new resolution in his mind. Gi-hun once again dives into the mysterious survival game, starting another life-or-death game with new participants gathered to win the prize of 456 billion won.”
Given the brutal nature of what went down in season one, there’ll be an almost entirely new cast working under director-writer-producer Hwang Dong-hyuk—but there will be a few familiar faces alongside Lee as Gi-hun: Lee Byung-hun as the sinister Front Man, Wi Ha-jun as determined police detective Hwang Jun-ho (who also happens to be the Front Man’s brother), and Gong Yoo as the slippery Salesman.
New cast members include Yim Si-wan, Kang Ha-neul, Park Gyu-young, Lee Jin-uk, Park Sung-hoon, Yang Dong-geun, Kang Ae-sim, Lee David, Choi Seung-hyun, Roh Jae-won, Jo Yu-ri, and Won Ji-an. Don’t get too attached to anyone!
Not only was the first Squid Game a ratings smash for Netflix—the streamer reported the show notched “over 1.65 billion viewing hours in 28 days, and reached 111 million accounts, becoming Netflix’s first series to surpass 100 million members at launch”—it took on a cultural life of its own, spawning a spin-off reality series (also on Netflix), Halloween costumes, a recent Futurama homage, and more. It also made history at the Emmys with 14 nominations and six wins; it was the first non-English language show to earn an Outstanding Drama Series nom, and Hwang (who won for best directing for a drama series) and Lee (best actor in a drama series) were “the first Asians and the first South Koreans to win in their respective categories, and the first ones to do so with a non-English language series,” according to Netflix.
Will all that history-making repeat itself when season two arrives on Netflix December 26? A third and final season has already been announced as arriving in 2025.
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