This article was published on December 30th. published and on December 31st. republished.

If you’ve seen Season 2 of Squid Game at this point, you know that it actually only feels like half a season, with a huge cliffhanger in the middle and only half of the actual games (spoilers).

But luckily, we don’t have to wait another three years for the third season, as both Netflix and creator Hwang Dong-hyuk have ensured that this doesn’t happen by not taking production breaks between seasons. The result is a Season 3 of Squid Game that’s much, much closer than we think.

We’ve already heard of a “2025” release date, although that could have meant Christmas and therefore a year-long break. But now Hwang Dong-hyuk says it’s closer and maybe even just one half year until Squid Game returns. Here’s the window he gave when asked by Variety about the third season’s release date:

“At this point, anything I might say will be a spoiler, so I want to be careful. But what I can say is that after the start of the second season, I think we will soon announce the start date for the third season. I probably expect it to launch in the summer or fall of next year. But as for the plot of the third season, where Gi-hun lost everything, including his best friend, and all his attempts failed, now the question is: what will he be like? What condition will Gi-hun be in? And what will he choose? Will he continue the mission? Will he give up or persevere? And so you will meet our character Gi-hun at a very critical crossroads at the beginning of the third season. Gi-hun will not be the man he was in Season 2.”

Early summer would last six months, late fall more like 11 months if it were November, but somewhere in the middle we can split the difference to maybe 8 or 9. Whatever, that’s it Away It’s outside the norm for Netflix to literally produce annual seasons, let alone new seasons of a series that release in less than a year. But it’s clear that Squid Game Season 2 and 3 are different cases, actually just one very long season broken in half.

And yes, it was completely broken, one of the aspects that didn’t quite work in Season 2 (spoilers follow). The two B and C storylines about the cop who finds the island and the guard who gets involved in an organ harvesting operation were built up throughout the season but hardly went anywhere and undoubtedly didn’t pay off until Season 3 comes. And in Season 1, we completed all six games in nine episodes. Here we’ve only played through three episodes out of seven, and yes, it seems extremely likely that all three will be played out in Season 3. At least we don’t have to wait that long.

Update (12:31): There are some interesting quotes about why Hwang Dong-hyuk decided to break up Seasons 2 and 3 this way, as Season 2 feels like half a season with a litany of cliffhangers that are quite frustrating after the finale airs. Spoilers follow.

“There’s no particular reason other than that I originally envisioned it as a single series, so both seasons two and three as a single series when I wrote it. But then as I continued writing the story, it became too many episodes and too long a story because you see Gi-hun’s journey where he returns to the game but also goes through a revolt, and that’s actually the climax of this story , in which he tries to start a riot, but then everything fails.”

“And I also saw that aspect as another game, and that’s why I thought we would split it into two seasons to achieve that – Gi-hun’s revolt failed, he ended up losing his best friend, that himself.” is another important climatic event in the first half of the season, i.e. in the second season.”

This seems like a case where this wasn’t really a decision mandated by Netflix, as they’ve been splitting seasons of returning popular shows in half lately. Rather, there were simply too many episodes here, probably another seven of an hour or more each, and Netflix never airs 14-episode, 14-hour seasons. But they obviously didn’t want to wait three years to finish this story either, so it will at least function more similarly to one of their traditional “breaks,” albeit with a gap of 6 to 12 months instead of 1 to 2 months. One of them is sort of and way how many seasons are divided into 10 episodes.

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