Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has hinted that his upcoming project, a movie called Killing Old People Club, won’t be one for the squeamish.
"It will be more violent than Squid Game," the director revealed in a recent interview with Variety, adding that the feature is sure to be “another controversial film.”
We know that Killing Old People Club is based on an unnamed novel by Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco, though details surrounding its plot remain under wraps for now. Eco, who died in 2016, was known for producing works with a focus on philosophy and religion – so there’s a good chance these themes could play into Hwang’s secretive project.
In our book, though, it’s equally likely that the Miss Granny and The Fortress director may have simply written a stylish screenplay about young people killing old people.
Blood-soaked slasher flicks have experienced something of a resurgence of late, with Texas Chainsaw Massacre and All of Us Are Dead among the genre’s most recent examples, and Hwang’s assertion that his upcoming movie will be even more violent than Squid Game forebodes an equally gruesome picture.
A film of that ilk wouldn’t appear totally alien to Korean audiences, either. The likes of Oldboy, Train to Busan and The Handmaiden have proven their willingness (and Korean directors' tendency) to embrace the graphic, so it’s a sure bet that Hwang will continue the trend with Killing Old People Club.
Variety reports that he's now submitted a 25-page treatment for the highly-anticipated project, but it’s not likely to hit screens until 2023, at the earliest.
When is Squid Game season 2 coming?
In the same Variety interview, Hwang also revealed that he is soon returning home to South Korea to begin work on Squid Game season 2, which he hopes will arrive on Netflix in 2024.
The hit Netflix series took the world by storm in 2021, inspiring everything from real-life robot dolls to amateur video game adaptations on its way to becoming the biggest show in the streamer’s history (after just 28 days, Squid Game racked up an unprecedented 1.6 billion viewing hours).
In doing so, the survival series also quite literally changed the game for how Netflix measures the success of its movies and TV shows. Following Squid Game’s popularity, the streaming service shifted away from the two-minute-per-view metric it had previously used to instead record the total hours watched within a title’s first month of release.
As a result, it’s now much easier for fans to see the biggest Netflix series (and the biggest Netflix movies) in any given week – though no project has yet threatened Squid Game’s crown.
Squid Game season 2 was officially renewed by Netflix in January 2021, when co-CEO Ted Sarandos was quoted as saying that "the Squid Game universe has just begun." We knew director Hwang was working on a movie project (which we now know to be Killing Old People Club) at the time, so it isn’t too much of a surprise to hear that new Squid Game episodes won’t be arriving for some time.
To ease the wait, check out our breakdown of the Squid Game ending, which poses big questions about what to expect from the show’s second season.
