‘Squid Game’ Season 2 Breaks Netflix Opening Week Record In Top 10s With 68M Views

One of the most anticipated new releases of 2024 just dropped over Christmas, and the time has come to see how well the show is performing. Squid Game season 2 has been breaking FlixPatrol records since it dropped, but is it breaking Netflix records? Let’s take a look at those first-week stats. 

In case you missed it, after three years, Squid Game returned for its penultimate season, with the third and final part eying a June 2025 release date. Netflix threw everything at this release, partnering with dozens and dozens (if not hundreds) of brands, releasing a mobile companion game, and doing everything in the marketing toolbox, all in the hopes of making this a huge hit. 

As a reminder, Squid Game season 1 featured in the Netflix top 10s for 15 weeks straight between September 12th and December 26th, 2021. The show has featured in those global top 10s for 23 weeks in total, picking up 2.3 billion viewing hours globally over those 23 weeks, equating to 281.60 million views. From the Netflix Engagement Reports, covering all of 2023 and the first half of 2024, the show picked up 251.20 million hours (or 30.2 million views).

So, how well did season 2 do? Well, it broke records. 

Here’s how Netflix describes the launch in their press release:

“Like presents under the Christmas tree, fans couldn’t wait to unwrap new episodes of Squid Game this week. Season 2 of the massively popular Korean series from creator/director Hwang Dong-hyuk and starring Lee Jung-jae topped the non-English TV list with a whopping 68 million views, ranking No. 1 in 92 countries and breaking the record for most views for a show in its premiere week (previously set by Wednesday Season 1 in 2022, with 50.1 million views).

Since its release on Dec. 26, the show’s sophomore run has already become Netflix’s seventh most popular non-English TV show in record time — Squid Game Season 1 remains at the top with 265.2 million views — and propelled the multiplayer video game Squid Game: Unleashed to No. 1 in action games on the App Store in 57 countries. And there’s more to come: the third and final season is due out in 2025.”

Let’s put that week 1 number into context vs other Netflix movies, series, and the recent Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight. It’s not even close. 

If we look at how well season 2 stacks up against Netflix’s biggest all-time hits, you can see it’s got off to an incredible start.

Season 1 wasn’t a hit right off the bat it’s worth remembering, with a rather ordinary first week, but it was in week 2 when the show hit another level. That’s demonstrated quite nicely when we compare it against Wednesday and Fool Me Once, two other shows in Netflix’s all-time most-watched list.

The series is almost certainly going to replace Squid Game season 1 as the most-watched non-English series in a matter of weeks at this rate. 

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Is TikTok A Big Driver for Squid Game? (Again)

TikTok is once again doing its part to help promote Squid Game by our estimates. Everyone’s “For You” page is obviously different, but looking around the various hashtags and accounts promoting Squid Game content, you can see purely by the number of views that season 2 content is hitting a lot of people’s feeds. 

Sadly, we don’t quite have definitive numbers for TikTok, but you can see #SquidGame2 has over 443.6K posts, and the main tag now carries 2.6M posts. The main Squid Game Netflix account barely has a recent video below 1M views, with some of them reaching up to 37.5M views. TikTok’s Creative Center also shows interest in the show rocketing and featuring several times in TikTok trending hashtags. I attributed some of the success of Squid Game S1 to TikTok and I’m going to do the same here again now. 

Celebrating on social media, Netflix shared a first-look picture for season 3 of the show:

Are you impressed with Netflix’s huge launch for Squid Game season 2? Let us know in the comments.