The Paper's reporter Cheng Xiaojun
Right now, a storm called the "Squid Game" is sweeping the world.
Since its launch on September 17, the on-demand volume of "Squid Games" produced by streaming platform Netflix has soared. On October 12, Netflix announced on its official social media account that the nine-episode Korean drama had become the best-performing work in the platform's history with 111 million on-demand (more than 2 minutes) users , the previous record was 82 million on-demand subscribers in the four weeks of the American drama "Bridgerton" . At the same time, "Squid Games" became the first work in Netflix's history to exceed 100 million on-demand users in the four weeks of broadcasting. This "squid storm" may seem sudden, but it is not without a trace.
Netflix's Eastward Strategy
For Netflix, which started as a DVD rental business, it was only natural to focus on the United States and Europe, where the geoculture is closer, when it first built its streaming business. However, with the saturation of these two markets, coupled with the population concentration, it is understandable that Netflix has made a big push into the Asian market in recent years. The success of "Squid Game" is undoubtedly the reward of this eastward strategy.
In September 2015, Netflix landed in Japan as its first stop in Asia, and in 2016, it landed in South Korea, where it appointed Minyoung Kim, the first head of content for the Asia-Pacific region. Similar to the model developed in Europe and the United States, Netflix started by buying popular shows and film and television works broadcast by local TV networks, and then cooperated with excellent local creators to create original content. "Late Night Canteen: Tokyo Story", "Spark", "Naked Director", "Alice in the Land of the Dead" launched in Japan, "Kingdom", "Hunting Time" and "King: Eternal Monarch" launched in South Korea, and "Indian Matchmaker" launched in India, all of which have contributed to its opening up of local markets.
Of course, investment and return are inherently complementary. According to data released by Netflix, it invested nearly $2 billion in developing original content and purchasing rights in Asia from 2018 to 2020, involving 220 works (sets).
Among the above-mentioned works, the zombie drama "Kingdom", jointly created by "To the End" and "Tunnel" director Kim Sung-hoon and "Signal" screenwriter Kim Jin Yin-hee, is even more similar to the style of American dramas, which not only makes Netflix's users in South Korea surge, but also gained a good number of on-demand in overseas markets. Perhaps, it is from here that Netflix sees that Asian manufacturing can not only be popular at home, but also go out.
In 2020, Netflix's number of subscribers in Asia Pacific increased by 9.3 million, up 65% from 2019, while revenue from Asia Pacific increased by 62%, the fastest growing region in the world. Such results further encourage Netflix to focus its next development on the Asia-Pacific region.
According to Bloomberg's report in late 2020, Netflix plans to double the amount of investment in the development of original content in Asia in 2021. While Netflix hasn't announced a specific amount, media Partners Asia, an industry research firm, estimates that the budget will not be less than $1 billion, which naturally includes investment in Squid Games.
In a recent bloomberg report, Netflix was quoted as saying that the production cost of the whole series of "Squid Game" was 25.4 billion won (about 130 million yuan). Business Insider, another U.S. business information outlet, said the single version of Squid Games was 2.8 billion won (about 15.22 million yuan). The report also listed 9.5 billion won and 11.9 billion won for the single editions of Stranger Things and The Crown, also produced by Netflix, to highlight the low cost of Squid Games. However, in terms of local terms, the production cost of 25.4 billion won is not low, not only higher than the previous 20 billion won of "Kingdom", but also four times the production cost of 5 billion won for a Korean mini-series (usually 16 to 20 episodes).
Of course, in terms of roback, the production cost of "Squid Game" is indeed a drop in the bucket. According to South Korean media reports, as the show became popular, Netflix's stock price appreciated to a maximum of 415.4 billion won, and the streaming giant earned 28 trillion won with 25.4 billion won.
With the explosion of "Squid Games", it is also exciting to see what new dramas will be spawned by the $2 billion that Netflix will spend in Asia this year. In August last year, Myleeta Aga, Netflix's head of content for Southeast Asia, revealed in an interview with Reuters that original projects in Indonesia and Thailand were already on the way. The next global hit from Asia may once again come unexpectedly.
While sparing no expense to create original content, Netflix's development in Asia is also a hidden resistance. Its biggest competitor, Disney+, will be officially launched on November 12 and November 16 in Taiwan and Hong Kong, Respectively. In the face of the menacing Hollywood boss with many big IPs, whether Netflix's subscriber number in Asia can continue to grow; if growth slows down and profits decline, whether it will continue to spend money to create original content is also a question.
Stills from Squid Games
A flash of inspiration for non-English-speaking culture
According to CNN, "Squid Games" topped the list of the top 10 on-demand views in 94 countries or regions where Netflix has an on-demand service; it is also the first non-English-speaking country to top the U.S. on-demand list. People not only enthusiastically discussed the plot, but also transplanted the game of passing in the play into reality, along with the costumes uniformly worn by the people in the play, the candy used in the game, and the alarm clock designed according to the image of the giant girl in "123 Wooden Man".
Netflix's "Squid Games" character avatar.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Kim Min-young, Netflix's head of asia-Pacific content, said: "For the company, the extraordinary significance of Squid Games is that it proves that our globalization strategy is completely correct. "We always believe that truly local content will be the most widely disseminated, so incorporating the most Korean games and characters into a show can be popular not only in Korea, but also in other parts of the world." ”
However, Kim Min-young also admitted that it was unexpected that Squid Games would be so successful worldwide. In her opinion, the game setting in the play is easy to trigger the nostalgia of Korean audiences for childhood on the one hand; on the other hand, it is also very easy to understand for audiences outside Of Korea, which may be a major reason why the show can eat everything in Korea and abroad.
Another point worth noting is that a Korean-produced drama can be widely popular around the world, reflecting the trend of global cultural diversification. Today, the hegemony of English-language culture is gradually disintegrating, and even Hollywood, the global center of home entertainment product manufacturing, is focusing on diversity. With the strong rise of streaming in the post-pandemic era, this trend is even more pronounced. According to mediametrie, a French multimedia research company, 72 new non-English dramas were launched on global streaming platforms in 2020, a 55% increase over 2019. This year, with the popularity of new dramas such as South Korea's "Squid Game" and France's "Arthur Robin", this number will undoubtedly continue to rise.
The korean dialogue of "Squid Game" can become popular around the world, which is not unrelated to the siege of Korean pop culture in the West in recent years. Whether it is the K-pop combination or the film "Parasite" winning the highest honor of the Oscar, it has greatly enhanced the international visibility of the East Asian country. The success of "Squid Game" has also further enhanced South Korea's soft power, as South Korean President Moon Jae-in said. According to duolingo, an online language learning website and app, in the two weeks since the broadcast of Squid Games, the number of newly registered Korean students in the UK has soared by 76%, while the number of new students in the US has increased by 40%, making Korean the second highest number of new languages added to the platform, after Hindi.
What can be compared is that the American drama "Bridgeton", which was only successful in "Squid Games", did not win the hearts of Asian audiences. Although Bridgeton, which is based on 19th-century aristocratic love stories, maintains the well-made production of Netflix, the historical nihilism of using African-American actors to play aristocratic dukes may be difficult to convince Asian audiences who were educated to live in the water in the 19th century.
In addition, the theme of "Squid Game" resonates with Western audiences. Director Hwang Dong Hyuk rose to fame with the film "The Melting Pot", which is based on real events, and still injected care for social real problems such as the gap between rich and poor and survival anxiety in "Squid Game". This also makes "Squid Game" different from the general cool drama, but as the director said, it is an allegory about contemporary capitalist society. These problems are not only in South Korea itself, but also in Western society, which are also persistent diseases that ordinary people feel empathy for.
Editor-in-charge: Cheng Yu
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang