Netflix hasn’t confirmed any plans about any Squid Game spin-off publicly, but you’d hope Director Hwang would get the heads up about any continuation of the franchise he created. (And hopefully he’ll continue making money off of it—he was pretty up front about only continuing past the first season because he needed the pay check.) “I’ve always been a huge fan of David Fincher’s work—from Seven and I’ve loved his films. So if he were to create an American Squid Game, I think that would be very interesting to watch,” he shared with THR. “I would definitely click on it immediately after it’s released, if it were to happen.”
Hwang reiterated that he didn’t include Blanchett, or the concept of an American recruiter, as a backdoor pilot for a spin-off. Instead, “because this story started out with me wanting to tackle issues about the limitless competition and the system that’s created in late capitalism, I wanted to leave it on a note highlighting the fact that these systems, even if one comes down, it’s not easy to dismantle the whole system—it will always repeat itself,” he explained. “That’s why I wanted to end it with an American recruiter. And I wrote that scene wanting an impactful ending for the show, not in order to open rooms for anything else.”
While writing, he thought having a female recruiter “would be a nice contrast and also quite a powerful, impactful element,” so then he set out to find the right female actor. “It’s a very short scene. There’s only one line, so we needed someone who had that level of presence and charisma to completely dominate the screen in that instant. And that naturally led me to Cate Blanchett. I’ve always been a fan of hers. She’s someone who can instantly grab your attention with a single stare. So [that’s how] we set on her.”
If Squid Game represents a pretty bleak outlook on the world, that’s because Hwang has a pretty bleak outlook: “The world seems to be headed for the worst. It seems to be becoming, in so many different ways, so much worse ahead,” he said. Though Gi-hun’s story is a hopeful one that sacrifice can bring about change, Hwang also wanted to “highlight that the system is so strong and deeply rooted that it’s not something that can be easily dismantled, and therefore it requires all of our continued efforts and strong will.” If Squid Game the concept can’t easily be dismantled, we imagine Squid Game the show won’t be, either.
