When Will Season 3 Premiere? What We Know About the Final Game — and the Uncertain Fate of Player 456
Warning: Squid Game season 2 spoilers ahead!
Fans waited more than three years for Squid Game season 2 to premiere — but that won't be the case for Squid Game season 3.
On Jan. 1, Netflix announced that the Korean thriller's third installment would be released in 2025.
"I probably expect that to launch around summer or fall next year," creator Hwang Dong-hyuk previously told Variety in December 2024.
Squid Game season 2, which was released on Dec. 26, ended with a major cliffhanger. In the seventh and final episode, Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) leads an uprising of the players, which results in the brutal murder of his best friend, Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), at the hands of the Squid Game supervisor: Front Man (Lee Byung-hun).
Unbeknownst to Gi-hun, the Front Man is actually In-ho — a previous winner of the Squid Game who now works as the head guard and is posing as Player 001 and using the name Young-il.
"I thought that that was an adequate moment to put a stop and give [Gi-hun] a little bit of closure along [his] long story arc," Hwang Dong-hyuk told Variety of the second season's final moments. "In the third season, having that sense of huge guilt and sense of failure weighing heavily on him — how is Gi-hun going to carry on his mission? That’s the story that’ll further unfold."
Here's everything we know about Squid Game season 3 so far.
Squid Game season 2 ended with a player rebellion.
Gi-hun, aka Player 456, led a small group of his fellow "X" team members (those who voted to end the game) on a mission to infiltrate the game's control room and confront the Front Man. After ambushing a group of pink guards in the quarters, the rebels, armed with guns, made their way to the colorful stairwells.
They were met with heavy fire, but Gi-hun and Jung-bae, aka Player 390, pushed forward to the control room while In-ho/Young-il (Player 001); Na-yeon's father (Player 246); Hyun-ju (Player 120); Dae-ho (Player 388) and several others stayed behind to hold off the masked men.
When Gi-hun and Jung-bae radio that they're short on ammo and need backup, In-ho/Young-il — whose true identity is the Front Man — suggests he and two other men come to their aid. Player 001 ultimately double-crosses the players, killing both men before they can reach Gi-hun and Jung-bae.
Out of ammunition, Gi-hun and Jung-bae are forced to surrender. Seconds later they are confronted by the Front Man, who has traded his Player 001 green tracksuit for a menacing gray ensemble and a black mask.
"Did you have fun playing the hero? Now, witness the consequences of your little game," the Front Man says to Gi-hun before killing his best friend, Jung-bae.
An official synopsis for Squid Game season 3 has not been released, but Dong-hyuk told Variety that Gi-hun will be at a very "critical crossroads" in the third installment following his risky decision to launch a rebellion.
"Squid Game season 3 will bring brand-new games and even wilder character dynamics," Jung-jae said in an interview with Netflix on Jan. 2. Kang Ae-sim, who plays Geum-ja (Player 149) added: "Season 3 will make you break into tears."
Dong-hyuk also teased the return of the VIPs while speaking with USA Today.
"They're coming. They're on the way. Their chopper is flying over the island now," he said of the wealthy spectators who enjoyed watching the players fight and die as they bet millions in season 1.
Squid Game season 3 will premiere in 2025.
The exact date has yet to be announced, however, creator Dong-hyuk told Variety that he expects it may come in the summer or fall.
Netflix has not released an official trailer for Squid Game season 3. However, the streaming platform did share a 15-second teaser with fans on X in January 2025.
The brief clip revealed a new character: Chul-su — a boy counterpart to the terrifying killer doll Young-hee.
The Exact ‘Squid Game’ Season 3 Release Date May Have Been Leaked By Netflix
While Netflix has established that season 3 of Squid Game is coming in 2025 in multiple promos for its content in the coming year, they may have accidentally let the exact date slip.
Netflix Korea briefly had a video go live that didn’t just have the 2025 release date, but a specific date, June 27, 2025. That would be just six months from now, essentially record time in releasing a new season of a huge show, especially when it took three years to get from season 1 to season 2.
However, if you’ve watched season 2 and heard anything that creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has said about this, you’ll know that this is more or less Part 2 of Season 2, rather than a season 3 in a more traditional sense. Here’s what happened:
“No other particular reason than that I originally envisioned it as a single series, so both seasons two and three as a single series when I was writing it. But then, as I wrote the story along, it became to be too many episodes and too long of a story because you see Gi-hun's journey where he returns to the game, but also he goes through a revolt, and that is actually the climax of that storyline, where he tries to create an uprising, but then that all goes to failure.”
“And I also saw that aspect of it as yet another game as well, and so I thought that we would divide it into two seasons to have that – Gi-hun's revolt going into a failure, him ending up losing his best friend, that itself being yet another important climatic event in the first half of the season, so into season two.”
Production on both seasons happened all at once, so part of this three year gap was Hwang making a giant 14 episode arc that was split into two seasons. While Netflix has been doing a “split a new season of a popular series in half” release schedule a lot of the time as of late, that’s usually 4 and 4 or 5 and 5 and a month or so apart. Here, six months apart, with seven hour long episodes each? Sure, I guess I’ll give them the “season 3” badge in this case.
Why so soon? Well, again, I think Netflix knows that people clearly want the cliffhangers of season 2 resolved sooner rather than later, but also the way they’re spacing out content means they probably want the second half of 2025 devoted to its other two massive shows, the final season of Stranger Things, season 5, and season 2 of Wednesday, its two most-watched English series of all time, with Squid Game being its most-watched overall. It is going to be an absolutely huge year for Netflix due to how all this is lining up.
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Some Disappointing News About ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5’s Release Date
Stranger Things season 5 seems poised to be Netflix’s highest-viewed English language show of all time, and it might even be able to take the overall crown from Squid Game. But when is it actually arriving? There’s some news about the Stranger Things season 5 release date that is…less than encouraging.
It’s just been announced that Stranger Things season 5 has wrapped filming, according to its cast. Good news, sure, but when you look into just how long post-production takes on the show, that means the release date is still extremely far off, and the gap between seasons 4 and 5 will be pretty enormous by the end.
The end result is going to be over three years between seasons and closer to three and a half, most likely. Even for Netflix, used to big gaps between seasons, this is really stretching the bounds of acceptability, and it’s hard to believe that this is a world where we used to get a new season of Game of Thrones every year.
But for Netflix’s biggest series, as annoying as this is, there are not exactly mountains of evidence that this matters for its biggest series. It’s easy to imagine that some series that will have the service’s biggest gaps like Wednesday and Stranger Things, are still going to put up incredible numbers. You could almost argue the delay helps in some ways, as it builds anticipation. Still, as a viewer, I hate it, and so do many others, even if yes in the end we will still watch.
Only very, very few shows these days are able to get out of the 18 month to two year gap between seasons, which stretches to 3+ when things go really badly. The Bear puts out a new season on the dot every year. Slow Horses practically does every 8-9 months or so with back-to-back-to-back filming and instant renewals. But they are the exception now, not the rule. Too bad for us who wished Stranger Things came back two years ago.
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House Of The Dragon’s Most Puzzling Season 2 Moment Is Really Strange And Out Of The Blue
I have very mixed feelings about Season 2 of House Of The Dragon, which I really did like overall, but which in many ways feels like a season frozen in time. Things happened, sure, but by the end it’s as if the entire ungainly machinery of Westeros’s most brutal civil war simply stood still. The disappointing finale really cements that feeling of inertia.
Think about it: Season 1 ended with Team Green and Team Black on the precipice of war. I remember thinking, “Well that season was kind of slow, but I enjoyed all the build-up and character development, and now it’s about to go down!”
Season 2 has now ended with Team Green and Team Black on the precipice of war. Again. But now I’m thinking, “Well that season was kind of slow, and while I enjoyed all the build-up and character development, I expected more was actually going to happen!” I certainly didn’t expect things to end exactly the same way as Season 1.
And sure, we have more dragonriders now. Armies are marching. We are more poised for war than we were before. But it’s still build-up, and maybe that’s all we needed after 18 episodes, but we probably needed two more episodes in this season to really make it stick. In episode 9, we could have had the big battle. And when I say big battle, I don’t mean they need to show us all the various armies fighting, all the dragons battling in the sky, every ship in every fleet smashing into each other. A lot of that can happen offscreen. We just need the most important bits.
Episode 10, the finale, could have been the falling action, dealing with the fallout of the battle and setting the stage for Season 3. I think everyone would have been really happy with that instead of a two year wait.
But wait! I’ve entirely buried the lede. I got sidetracked thinking about how annoyed I am with the way this season ended, I almost forgot why I was writing this post in the first place. It’s because of this guy:
What in the name of the Seven is Otto Hightower doing locked in a cage? Is it even a cage? Is it the hold of a ship, or a barn or something? He looks dirty, so I assume he’s being held in captivity, but by whom? And where? And for what reason?
The show slipped this in all sneaky-like in what is perhaps the most clumsily handled, perplexingly strange moment in the entire series’ run. Right at the very end—as Alicent walks from Dragonstone—as the “episode is about to end” music plays (and what music!) we get this two second scene of Otto sitting here looking glum.
What is the point of this? We’ve heard he’s been hard to get ahold of, and we know Aemond is trying to bring him back to be Hand, but there’s been no other scene with him since he was dismissed by his grandson, Aegon, early on in the season. My only guess—and I think it’s the best possible guess—is that Larys, when tasked with finding Otto, arranged for his imprisonment. Maybe he’s being held even now in the dungeons of the Red Keep, held by Larys’s loyalists. That’s kind of interesting, but is it interesting enough to toss in when the whole entire rest of the season is ending on one massive, infuriating cliffhanger?
Honestly, I think I’m mostly annoyed by these cliffhangers because of the way George R.R. Martin ended A Dance Of Dragons, the fifth (and possibly final) book of A Song Of Ice And Fire. So many cliffhangers. Chapter after chapter of them. And this from a guy who takes years—decades!—to finish a book. It’s the last thing we need in House of the Dragon. A good cliffhanger ending works in some shows. Here, I’d much rather get a satisfying end-point, some good denouement, and feel satisfied rather than teased. Having this weird Otto moment is just one more itch I don’t care to scratch.
We do, at least, finally have official confirmation of when the show is coming to an end. That’s something!
P.S. I included the top image for two reasons: First, I didn’t really want to give away what I was talking about in the image. That’s too easy. Second, I wanted to discuss that moment as well. I think Daemon comes over to Rhaenyra too easily. He bends the knee because of a vision that, let’s be honest, wasn’t very compelling. I’ll have more thoughts on that in a separate post. But what I wanted to also say is the reaction of Ser Simon Strong was one of the best moments of the season. Seeing him clap so happily in the background just made me love him even more. What a surprise treat that character ended up being!
Do you have any Otto Hightower theories? Let me know on Twitter and Facebook.
