Wen Observer Network Ruan Jiaqi
The Korean drama "Squid Game" produced by Netflix can be said to be the existence of "popular spicy chicken" in the current global film and television dramas. A group of desperate adults have attracted countless attention through the novel setting of children’s games to decide life and death, becoming Netflix’s first drama with a viewing volume of over 100 million, which has boosted Netflix’s market value in one fell swoop.
However, the male host in the play set a double standard, won the whole game, the collapse of the plot in the middle and late period and the controversy over the alleged plagiarism made the play hard to be called a "god-sealing" work, and the Douban score dropped from 8.7 points at the beginning of the show to 7.6 points.
The topic setting and plot design of "Squid Game" did not surpass the classic theme of "The Great Escape", but the advantage was that the gameplay was simple, there was no cultural barrier, and it was easy for audiences from all over the world to understand. Scenes of bloody violence that stimulate the senses can stimulate the preferences of certain audiences, and directly hit the survival struggle of the bottom people. Today, with the growing gap between the rich and the poor and the pressure of survival, it even resonates with audiences in different regions.
Behind the phenomenal explosion of "Squid Game", it is even more inseparable from Netflix’s globalization strategy, and its marketing all over the sky has also made it "bite back".
Adult issues are reduced to children’s games, eye-catching and absurd index MAX
Judging from the cast, the lineup of "Squid Game" is luxurious, and there are many big coffees:
The director at the helm is Huang Donghe, who is good at social reality. Squid Game is his first TV play.
Huang Donghe: You may not know who he is, but you must have heard of his masterpiece "Melting Pot" (2011). This film is adapted from the sexual violence that really happened in a school for the deaf in Gwangju, which created 5.7 million movie-watching achievements, and then promoted the resumption of investigation of related cases and the improvement of Korean laws.
Huang Donghe/The Furnace poster
Li Zhengzai, the leading actor, is a Korean veteran male god. He has been in the front line for more than 30 years and holds the Qinglong Award winner.
Male No.2 Park Hae soo was a late bloomer, and by the tenth year of his acting career (2017), he became a rising star of the "Uncle World" acting school with his wonderful performance in "Smart Prison Life".
Li Zhengzai, Park Hae soo
Even the guest actors in the play are not ordinary people;
Gong Yoo "Agassi" in the Korean drama "Ghosts" has become a "suit thug" who has been crazy about 400 people’s ear posts here;
Lee Byunghun, the "light of Korea" and "the most expensive actor in Korean dramas" in Hollywood, also plays a mysterious man full of stories.
The cast of Cass composed of these actors alone is eye-catching, not to mention that the content of the series is still the theme of "The Great Escape" that has been hot all the time:
The story takes place on an isolated and nameless island. 456 people who have fallen into desperate situations due to personal reasons such as crime and gambling receive mysterious invitations from unknown organizations and are taken to the island to participate in survival games. In the end, the only winner will get a prize of 45.6 billion won (about 39 million US dollars), while the losers will die in this unknown place.
In fact, the theme of the story is not novel, but different from the usual secret room survival, which is either brain-burning or brutal, the survival challenge of Squid Game is based on six traditional children’s games: 123 Woodenhead, Tantang, tug-of-war, playing marbles, walking on the glass bridge and squid game.
The "sugar challenge" refers to the complete deduction of the pattern in the sugar cake.
Playing this game when I was young, losing is nothing more than being eliminated and playing another game, but "out" here means "physical dog belt".
The game room is packaged as a children’s style of "blue sky and white clouds" and "sliding slide seesaw". However, the warm and lovely atmosphere is greeted by bloody pieces and corpses everywhere, and innocent children’s games determine a person’s life and death.
It is a big shock for the audience to reduce the adult issue to the situation of children’s games, which is very contrasting.
The first game "One Two Three Woodenhead" scared people to death:
The newly arrived players still don’t know what happened, and they ran forward with a smirk. I didn’t expect it to be serious-the giant doll that gave people the "horror valley effect" turned around instantly, and the player who was still shaking casually was killed in the next second;
I never thought that playing a game would kill me, and the crowd was in chaos. The out-of-control players cried and ran back to quit the game, but they were already in the game, so they could leave if they wanted, and all those who violated the rules of the "Woodenhead" game were shot;
Seeing that there is no way out, the rest of the players can only fight back their fears, hold down their trembling bodies and continue to move forward.
In the first round of the game, only half of the players survived with the magical nursery rhyme of the giant doll "Harmless to People and Animals".
Only then can I understand the price of the so-called "game". The surviving players quit. They just want to win some money, but they don’t really want to put their lives in it, crying and begging for mercy to quit.
The person in charge of the mysterious organizer didn’t stop him, but he did an intriguing thing first: he directly released the bonus for the end of the game, and the transparent "little golden pig" that fell from the sky was poured with half a belly of money, "one person died with a bonus of 100 million won".
The commotion in the crowd gradually quieted down, and everyone looked up at the piles of money in the air, and their eyes gradually became infected with a layer of madness.
According to the regulations, if someone votes to stop the game, more than half of them can quit collectively. However, as expected, affected by the bonus, many people temporarily turned against the water, which led to almost a draw in the number of votes. Finally, they chose to quit by a narrow margin, and everyone was thrown back to the street.
But it didn’t take long for most of the players who left to return to the game, because they found that compared with the reality of this "hell", the "repair field" in the game still had a chance.
Once in the game, there will be no turning back. Since then, bloody violence has spread all the way, and suspense has been thrown out one after another.
The male host set up a "holy father", and in the second half of the story, the vulgar bugs piled up and the ending was rotten.
However, with the appearance of the usual "curse of the first three episodes" produced by Netflix, that is, the first three episodes are fast-paced and intensive, the follow-up story of "Squid Game" began to fall into the stereotype, and the word-of-mouth collapsed and was approved as "unfinished".
It’s like drinking a bottle of coke, drinking it out of breath, chewing a piece of gum, chewing it, chewing it, it’s boring.
Up to now, the most controversial thing is the double-label "Holy Father" design of the hero "Cheng Qixun".
Qi Xun is a middle-aged divorced and unemployed "gambling dog", who is 47 years old. He doesn’t wash dishes after dinner and puts them in the pool until his old mother comes home from her busy work. For the sake of conscience, he casually confessed that the old mother should not be so busy: although I don’t support the elderly, I feel sorry for her!
The old mother gave him money to celebrate her granddaughter’s birthday. As a result, Qi Xun turned to steal her mother’s bank card to bet on horses.
Even before, Qi Xun cancelled his mother’s medical insurance for gambling money, and gambled away the deposit, which made his mother look down on the disease, and it was also the chief culprit that eventually led her to die at home and no one knew.
Until the old mother’s foot was rotten due to complications of diabetes, which was so serious that she was about to be amputated, Qi Xun had the cheek to go to his ex-wife to borrow money. The ex-wife’s current husband gave money and asked Qi Xun not to appear in his house again. This sentence poked blx, who was sensitive to Qi Xun’s inferiority complex. He knocked the other side to the ground and threw the money back. "Is it great to have money?"
Compared with his own dignity, what is the big deal about his mother’s body that needs hospitalization?
Such a selfish ghost who has no responsibility for his loved ones has become an honest and wonderful person in the game, taking good care of everyone in the small group, especially caring for the elderly, and leading everyone to unite through the crisis at times of collective riots such as night fights.
In the play, Cheng Qixun takes special care of a mysterious old man.
Did Qi Xun show his great humanity in the game? That’s not true, just because the knife is not on his neck, and his kindness depends on whether his own interests are damaged.
When the gun was pointed at Qi Xun’s head, he immediately showed his true colors. In order to win the game and live, he did not hesitate to cheat the old man who had the best relationship with him. It is clear that he will do whatever it takes to survive, but the next second he is standing on the moral high ground, blaming the second man for killing other players is cold-blooded and heartless.
Everyone who survived the Great Escape didn’t step on other people’s bodies, and now they are pretending to be "moral emperors" and saying that they can’t kill innocent people indiscriminately.
At the end of the day, there were only Qi Xun, the second man and the female host, and Qi Xun formed an alliance with the seriously injured female host, saying that he would get rid of the second man before ending the game, and the two left.
However, if Qi Xun really just wants to end the game, he can vote. Even if Man Er doesn’t agree, he and the women’s alliance can reach more than half of the votes of 2:1, but he didn’t do that and wanted to kill Man Er.
We agreed not to "kill innocent people"? What’s the trouble?
However, such a person with a "flexible" moral bottom line, at the end of the play, carried the banner of "people are good" camp, and it was really unconvincing to go to war with the big boss who believed that "human nature is evil" and manipulated and played with human nature behind the scenes.
The most unbearable thing is that in a big escape game, Qi Xun wants wisdom and no wisdom, and he wants force value and no force value. It can be called the "five dregs of war" that both businesses are abolished, and he even won all the way with the "protagonist aura":
In Woodenhead’s game, Qi Xun, who has been scared silly, can hide behind someone taller than himself by the second male teacher. When his ankle fell to be locked by a machine gun, it was the Pakistani brother who took the risk of being dragged down and grabbed him;
Playing marbles, the old man deliberately pretended to be dementia and let Qi Xun take the last marble and walk him into the next game;
Taking the glass bridge, Qi Xun was so lucky that he was replaced by the first one, so he didn’t have to open the way.
The big escape killed others, and this wave is true.
In addition, with the development of the plot, there are many bugs in the film. As a work that exposes reality and humanity, it should be rigorous, but there are many details in the play that are difficult to explain with common sense.
For example, a policeman who sneaked into the island pretended to be a staff member of the organization, but in such an environment where the alert and rank were quite strict, he was closely monitored, and private communication was almost forbidden. How did he figure out the work content of the person he pretended to be without a teacher, and he did not give away the clues in the almost militarized control?
The police also stole a mobile phone to record video as evidence, and it was impossible to charge it all the time. The mobile phone was firm for nearly a week and there was still electricity to use.
In the play, a player helped the staff secretly do the black business of selling organs in exchange for the game information of the next day. As a result, one day, a small note with information was stuffed into a boiled egg …
Not to mention, since the beginning of the drama series, questions about plagiarism and stalk melting have never stopped. Some netizens have counted that at least seven works in four countries have elements and bridges in the drama.
"Symbolized" dress is similar to "House of Money" VS "Squid Game"
The split mirror is similar to "Listen to the God" VS "Squid Game"
There are "Skybridge" bridges, "Gambling Revelation" VS "Squid Game"
The drama exploded, the platform made a profit, and all the staff were promoted to coffee, and the same paragraph sold crazy.
Although I think that Squid Game is not an annual drama, it is probably a 7-point qualified "brainless drama" suitable for killing time, but I have to admit that this drama is really hot.
How popular is Squid Game? An intuitive data is that since it was launched on September 17, the number of global viewers (households) in less than four weeks has reached 111 million, exceeding the previous record of 63 million viewers in Bridgetown’s four-week broadcast.
It not only won Top1, the hot list of more than 190 countries and regions covered by Netflix, with 100% freshness of rotten tomatoes, but also became the first series of Netflix with a viewing volume of over 100 million, which was a veritable phenomenon explosion.
With the global fire of this drama, Netflix’s market value has soared by about $19.2 billion (123.7 billion yuan) since its launch, and recently hit a record high of $646.84 per share in the past 20 years, with a market value growth of over $10 billion.
Although the content of just 9 episodes has already ended, the follow-up effect of Squid Game is still fermenting.
Since 95% of the audience are overseas audiences outside Korea, according to Reuters, the series also set off a wave of learning Korean in many countries in Europe and America. According to the data of a language learning APP, the number of related users in the UK has increased by 76%, and that in the US has increased by 40%.
The local Korean stars in the play have also been able to go out of Korea and gain international fame, and the main creative actors have the opportunity to appear in the American talk show "Jimmy Show". After the promotion of all employees, advertisements and endorsements poured in, and even a few little-known bit part got the resources of the leading role in the first-line drama series.
In particular, the Korean actress Zheng Haoyan, who plays the Korean woman "Jiang Xiao" in the play, has a shocking speed of becoming popular. Originally a model, after this transformation, she became a world-class top-notch, and the number of Instagram fans soared from 400,000 to 16.18 million, surpassing Song Hye Kyo to become the most popular Korean actress on Instagram.
LV, a first-line luxury brand, immediately threw an olive branch, and directly declared it as the global ambassador of the brand, endorsing three lines of fashion, jewelry and watches.
The booming business opportunities brought by the popularity of "Squid Game" are beyond everyone’s expectation.
In convenience stores in South Korea, the sales of white sugar, the main material of the drama, increased by 45% within two weeks of the launch of the drama, and the sales of finished products increased by three times. The sugar maker who provided 700 pieces of linden candy props for the play in Korea now sells more than 500 pieces of linden candy every day and hasn’t come home for a week in a row.
Auction, a Korean e-commerce platform, said that less than a week after the series was launched, even the sales of marbles toys increased by 860% over the same period of last month. According to the data of Lotte Mart Supermarket, the sales of squid increased by 49%, and the dry instant noodles of the same paragraph in the play were also sought after.
In addition to the storm of goods in the Asia-Pacific region, these surrounding areas are also selling like hot cakes on American shopping websites, and some products have entered the top 100 of the best-selling list of Amazon categories in the United States. CBS News pointed out that the green sportswear and red soldier clothes in the play are expected to become one of the most popular Halloween costumes in the United States this year.
On eBay, the sales of the same sportswear soared by 188%; According to the data of Sole Supplier’s sneaker store, the sales volume of white canvas shoes, the same model of VANS, an American sports brand, increased by 78 times.
So ordinary, why is it hot?
By the close of the show, the drama had no "prosperous time" at the time of its opening, and the score of Douban dropped from 8.7 points to 7.6 points. There were many evaluations of "opening higher and walking lower", but the slight lack of artistic value did not affect the global popularity of Squid Game.
If it is only because of the popular theme of large-scale+"infinite flow survival game", it seems that it can’t explain the global success of this drama. After all, the theme of "The Great Escape" has long been in the forefront, and the topic setting and plot design of "Squid Game" have not surpassed the classics. The same type of "fraud game", "Gambling Silent Record" and "Alice in the Dying Country" have a better reputation, but they can’t achieve this level of commercial success.
First of all, it is certain that it is well-made. From the content, the core of the Japanese "infinite flow" is a battle of wits, and the first step of "Squid Game" is to choose six kinds of children’s games with easy-to-understand rules as elimination levels to directly attack human nature and stimulate the bloody and violent scenes of the senses, which is easy to understand and reconstructs the rules of the game of childhood memories.
For the audience, no matter whether you have played this game or not, there is no rule to understand or even imitate the threshold, and it can arouse some audience’s nostalgia. Especially for western audiences, there are almost no cultural barriers, which enables the drama to harvest the global audience to the maximum extent.
These contents are rich in network meme, which are convenient for re-creation, conform to the characteristics of viral communication of social platforms today, and can spread like a duck to water in the short video era of information fragmentation, thus further deepening the influence of drama series.
Character setting is another highlight. Unlike the previous escape works, which featured teenagers, the role in Squid Game was dominated by young and middle-aged marginalized people, and all kinds of people were pushed to the last corner by fate: gambling frustrated men who suffered layoffs, social elites who suffered disastrous investment, foreign workers who were squeezed by black-hearted bosses, defectors who were cheated by intermediaries …
In today’s increasingly fierce social competition, increasing polarization between the rich and the poor, and increasing pressure on survival, these settings can directly attack the struggles of the people at the bottom, which can better arouse the resonance of audiences in different regions, even if cultural differences will not affect the audience’s empathy.
Jin Minying, the content director of Netflix in South Korea and Asia, also said that when talking about the phenomenal explosion of Squid Game, first, the rules of the game selected by the director are very simple; Secondly, the appearance and scheduling of the series are also very attractive, and there are many unforgettable scenes that can make the audience relive and create topics; Third, it lies in the film’s criticism of social injustice, including class differentiation and wealth inequality, as well as gender discrimination. These social problems exist not only in South Korea, but also in the whole world, so they can also arouse strong repercussions outside South Korea.
Foreign media, such as BBC and new york Times, think that the social inequality in Squid Game has hit the pain point of European and American society, especially when the epidemic intensifies the Matthew effect, fairness has become a luxury only related to the rich.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic in the United States, when countless factories and shops closed down and laid off workers, and tens of millions of people struggled to make ends meet, financial transactions were like boiling oil, and the rich reaped trillions of dollars. The new york Times believes that the Squid Game is not so much a game as a struggle in an extremely unequal society.
However, this also led to the drama series "Squid Game" being approved as "Western cultural vassals" and lacking cultural specificity. The background and game settings in this play, if set to any country, will not affect the normal development of the plot.
It’s not the first time that we have questioned the story that caters to western values under the cover of South Korea. For example, another Netflix Korean drama, Kingdom, is full of cultural elements of Lee’s Korea, but under the framework of the rights of eastern culture, grave defense, which originated from the imagination of western culture, is staged, trying to satirize the current social class solidification and the inequality between the rich and the poor.
The explosion of squid is inseparable from Netflix’s globalization strategy and marketing.
The success of Squid Game is actually the success of Netflix’s localization strategy and global layout, and it is the inevitable result of Netflix’s long-term investment in Japan and South Korea.
Around 2015, Netflix, rooted in the American market, found that the local user increment had already reached the ceiling, officially opening the globalization strategy. After the "Korean Restriction Order", the market demand of Korean cultural industry just bumped into Netflix’s global content demand. The two companies hit it off immediately, and South Korea became the second country in East Asia to cooperate with Netflix after Japan.
Netflix immediately set up two large studios in South Korea, and currently has 3.8 million subscribers in South Korea. From 2015 to 2020, Neflix invested $700 million in Korean content and broadcasted more than 80 Korean-made film and television works, such as Kingdom, Forced Landing of Love, itaewon Class, I am a relic organizer … which continued Netflix’s consistent style of "betting a lot, there is always one that can explode". Although the word of mouth is different, there are explosions every year.
Stills of Forced Landing of Love
CBS News reported that "Squid Game" is only a part of a series of Korean projects developed by Netflix this year, followed by works such as "Hell" and "Money House" waiting to be launched, with Yoo Ah In, Ji Chang Wook, Ha Jung Woo, Gong Yoo and other European and American "familiar" Han Xing all starring, and Netflix will invest an additional $500 million in the Korean market in the future.
The secret of Netflix localization can be simply summarized as: buying local scripts, using local teams, giving money generously, not interfering with the standard content at all, and setting up production centers in many places around the world.
Netflix, born in the United States, can’t do as the Romans do immediately after going to other regions. The previous Japanese TV series Underwear and White Collar, Korean TV series My Only Love Song, and Taiwan, China TV series The Dreamer are all in low ratings and have poor results. Until the filming of the Korean drama "Kingdom", Netflix chose to cooperate with a mature local team and spend money to incite a team of Korean experts, which led to a win-win audience.
Since then, in order to reduce the risk of "cultural discount" and overcome the acclimatization, Netflix will select local representative and distinctive themes for content creation according to the social and cultural characteristics of different countries and regions, tap local cultural materials and story elements, and enhance the internationalization level of content.
Japanese dramas have horror elements and human nature topics; Korean dramas like to focus on political power and play a funeral film by the way; Thai drama, supernatural fantasy elements can not be less; Taiwan, China, on the other hand, keeps the suspense factor.
The picture is from "DataENT Digital Entertainment"
Moreover, Netflix’s favorite thing for creators from all over the world is that they are willing to save money and not "manage things". Jin Yinji, the screenwriter of Kingdom, once said a particularly classic sentence, "Netflix never gives any opinions, only gives money."
Netflix’s investment in limited drama production in South Korea is quite generous, which is 2-3 billion won per episode, reversing the low investment pattern of only 400 million won per episode and making up for the shortcomings of short-term and small investment in Korean film and television. However, although the local team is fully released in creation, Netflix is particularly strict with post-production and quality, and will not renew the drama that fails to meet expectations after broadcasting.
Take "Squid Game" as an example. The director said that the script was actually completed as early as 2009, but many producers thought that the script was too bloody and had no commercial value until Netflix took over. According to public data, the production cost of a single episode of Squid Game is about 2.5 billion won, and the total production cost of nine episodes in the first season reaches 20 billion won, about 108 million RMB, which is a big investment in Korean dramas.
The Squid Game, with full Korean dialogue, provides subtitles in 37 languages and dubbing in 34 languages on Netflix. In order to help it "break the circle", Netflix has carried out a big marketing campaign all over the world.
Compared with Netflix’s conservative marketing strategy in the Asia-Pacific region, "Squid Game" has changed its normal state, and Netflix has come up with an online and offline marketing plan in line with the dramatic content.
In the pre-production stage, Netflix took the simple and easy-to-use game links such as "One Two Three Woodenhead" and "Casserole" as the marketing focus:
Before the series started, an interactive exhibition area was set up in itaewon subway station, which brought the puppet dolls, playgrounds, piggy banks, pink NPC and other elements into reality.
At a zebra crossing in the Philippines, Netflix set up a giant puppet doll. When passers-by ran a red light, the doll would turn its hair and stare like a play.
After "Squid Game" was broadcast, Netflix opened a flash cafe in Paris, where everyone can play the "Sugar Challenge" live, and successful players can get Netflix’s free user service for one month.
In addition to offline, online interaction is also wave after wave.
In North America, Netflix launched a video topic of "XX Challenge" which is in line with TikTok users’ habits, and adapted the games in the play into interactive video challenge games such as "Sugar Challenge" and "123 Woodenhead Challenge".
At present, the reading volume of related topics on TikTok has exceeded 32 billion, which is equivalent to that everyone in the world has seen it more than 4 times.
In order to improve game participation, Netflix also encourages viewers to restore the games online on Roblox, the world’s largest online game platform for most people, which not only promotes the Squid Game, but also satisfies the online interaction enthusiasm of fans, and also allows the creators of these small games to make a sum of money.
Taking advantage of the global craze of "Squid Game", Netflix has also begun to further exert its strength in the retail industry, and will cooperate with Wal-Mart to build an exclusive retail center, so that consumers can more conveniently purchase the surrounding areas of series such as "Squid Game".
At present, the massive marketing of Netflix seems to have met with a certain degree of "self-attack". The massive promotion has led to the Squid Game being pushed to many students as a TV-MA drama (forbidden to watch under the age of 17), which has caused concern and resistance from schools and parents’ organizations in many countries.
A school in Belgium issued an urgent reminder
The British "Daily Mail" combed the dramas launched by Netflix in recent months and found that at least six dramas had violence or pornography problems.
Some foreign media criticized that Netflix has used "bloody violence" as a wealth password in recent years. It knows that these scenes full of bloody violence can better mobilize the emotions and participation of the audience, while continuously pushing relevant videos to users who have seen violent bloody videos. At the same time, it is also consciously "cultivating" users’ interest in violent bloody and even pornography in exchange for ratings and economic benefits.
Source | Observer Network
Original title: "No one wants this Korean drama, how can it be made into a global explosion by Americans?" 》
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