Netflix drops trailer for Squid Game’s third and final season

Netflix has released the first trailer for the highly-anticipated third and final season of the hit South Korean drama Squid Game.

In the teaser, Seong Gi Hun (Lee Jung Jae), or Player 456, is brought back into the dormitory in a giant black gift box, after his failed rebellion at the end of season two which led to the death of his friend Jung Bae (Lee Seo Hwan), by The Front Man (Lee Byung Hun).

The teaser then goes on to show the remaining players all forced to play a new game, as they stand in front of a massive gumball machine that separates the players based on the colour of the balls dispensed.

The screen soon fades to black, while the background audio reveals a baby’s cry, implying that Kim Jun Hee or Player 222 (Jo Yu Ri), who was pregnant in the previous season, has given birth.

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 final two seasons were filmed back-to-back, so it was expected that the waiting period between them would be shorter than the three-year break between the first two.

Squid Game season two broke records after it was watched 68 million times in the first four days after it launched on Netflix on Boxing Day. Its viewership in premiere week beat Jenna Ortega thriller Wednesday’s 50.1 million views when it was released in 2022.

The show follows hundreds of cash-strapped individuals as they compete in deadly games for a life-changing sum of money, and their lives.

In a four-star review of the second season for The Independent, Annabel Nugent wrote: “So, can Squid Game capture lightning in a bottle for a second time? Well, yes and no. It is impossible to replicate the shock of that first outing, and Hwang Dong Hyuk does well not to try. Instead, his script finds the horror in witnessing the brutality again, through the eyes of Lee Jung Jae who returns in his Emmy-winning lead role. As reluctant hero Seong Gi Hun, he is easy to root for – all weary-eyed empathy and straight-arrow justice.”

Squid Game season 3 is set to release on 27 June on Netflix.