Netflix has announced the release date for Squid Game’s highly anticipated third and final season.
Season three of the streamer’s hit South Korean drama will premiere on June 27.
The news comes a month after the series — which sees 456 cash-strapped individuals compete in life-or-death children’s games for a chance at a life-changing sum of money — left fans on a climactic season two cliffhanger.
The final two seasons were filmed back-to-back, so fans were assured there would be a much shorter waiting period between them than the three-year break between the first two.
Series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has previously expressed his reluctance to continue the show’s storyline beyond its record-breaking 2021 debut season, admitting that it was the “money” that convinced him to do it.
“Even though the first series was such a huge global success, honestly I didn’t make much,” he told the BBC. “So doing the second series will help compensate me for the success of the first one too.”
The second installment, which came out on December 26, 2024, welcomes the return of Player 456/Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), who re-enters the game to try and shut it down for good.
While the second season impressed critics and viewers with its new array of characters and storylines, its action-packed finale proved divisive as some questioned how it could end on such a major cliffhanger.
“Of course, those watching would feel like, ‘Oh, no. What’s going to happen next? Give us the next episode right now,’” Hwang acknowledged in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “But I think that because, at that moment, Gi-hun loses everything, he fails all of his attempts [to stop the games], that is when he goes through yet another character transition. So I thought that was the best place to end the season.”
He explained that he had originally planned on writing the second season story across a span of about eight to nine episodes, but “once I finished the story, it came to over 10 episodes, which I thought was too long to contain in a single season.”
“So I wanted to have an adequate point where I could give closure as a second season and then move on with the third,” he said.
