Netflix has estimated that the hit Korean drama Squid Game will deliver approximately $891 million in “impact value,” according to a Bloomberg report. Impact value is a metric the streaming giant uses to judge the success of its individual shows. The Korean drama took $21.4 million to produce.
According to the report, a lawyer associated with Netflix told Bloomberg that publishing the confidential data would be “inappropriate.” The attorney reportedly told the news outlet, “Netflix does not discuss these metrics outside the company and takes significant steps to protect them from disclosure.”
Squid Game, set in South Korea, follows the lives of 456 debt-ridden contestants who battle it out in a series of children’s games with deadly consequences. The contestants compete for a cash prize of 45.6 billion won.
The show released on 17 September and within 23 days, 132 million households streamed at least two minutes of the show. Variety reported that almost 66% of those viewers watched the entire series.
Netflix reportedly saw its slowest pace in subscriber additions since 2013 in the first half of this year. The streaming company blamed the shortage of new hit shows and the coronavirus pandemic for the same.
Squid Game reportedly cost lesser to produce than the recent Dave Chappelle special, which has come under flack for being transphobic and offensive. According to a Bloomberg report, the Netflix metric which measures viewership relative to cost marked at 41.7x for Squid Game, while it measured at 0.8x for Chappelle’s show Stick & Stones.
The Korean survival drama was written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk and stars Lee Jung-jae, Wi Ha-joon, Park Hae-soo, Lee Jung-jae, Anupam Tripathi, among others.
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