The nine-episode thriller, Squid Game, Netflix's biggest original series till date, is set to create $900 million (roughly Rs 6,770 crore) in value for the streaming giant, according to a report.

The South Korean web series is based on how cash-strapped people play survival games with deadly consequences to win a prize of 45.6 billion South Korean wons (roughly Rs 290 crore).

The show was produced at a cost of $21.4 million (around Rs 160 crore) or about $2.4 million per episode, Bloomberg said, citing figures from an internal Netflix document.

Squid Game, which stands out for its popularity, generated $891.1 million in impact value in the first season.

According to the Netflix documents viewed by Bloomberg, around 132 million people had viewed at least two minutes of Squid Game within the first 23 days of the launch. The viewership broke the record of UK’s costume drama Bridgerton, which was watched by 82 million people within its first 28 days.

Netflix earlier said 111 million people had started watching Squid Game in October. However, it did not mention how many people stuck to watching it or finished the series (completion rate).

Unlike other TV networks or movie studios, Netflix does not share detailed performance metrics of its shows. As a result, the Netflix two-minute numbers look inflated when compared with reports of average numbers by other linear TV networks.

The Los Gatos-based online streaming giant estimated that 89 percent of people who started watching Squid Game completed at least 75 minutes or more than an episode. It also said 66 percent viewers, or 87 million people, finished watching the series in the first 23 days. In total, people spent more than 1.4 billion hours watching Squid Game.

While Netflix declined to comment on the report, an attorney representing the company said in a letter that it would be inappropriate for it to disclose the confidential data it has reviewed, the Bloomberg report added.

(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)

First Published:Oct 18, 2021 6:45 PM IST