Unless you’re from Mexico, you would be unlikely to have ever heard of Club de Cuervos. The Mexican comedy-drama about a football club struggling with the death of its long-term owner was Netflix’s first foray into original foreign language programming back in 2015. Now, over six years later, Netflix has announced that another foreign language original, Squid Game, is set to become its most popular series ever. The South Korean dystopian-thriller, in which a group of people with crushing debt are forced to play deadly playground games for a chance to win their fortune, made it to the top of Netflix in 90 countries around the world. To date, 95 per cent of viewers have come from outside South Korea.
The viral success of the show isn’t a one off. It’s an indicator of a growing demand for international shows, which won’t just reshape the future of television but also pose some major questions for how the industry operates. In a pre-Squid Game world, local content was used by services such as Netflix to attract more local eyeballs. The “one inch barrier” of subtitles, as South Korean Oscar-winner Bong Joon Ho called it, historically deterred most audiences from trying films and TV from beyond their own borders or language. But now that barrier is collapsing. “In the last two years, we have really seen breakout in non-English titles,” says Bela Bajaria, head of global TV for Netflix. In the US alone, Bajaria adds, 97 per cent of subscribers watched at least one non-English title in the last year.
And the Squid Game’s of this world are just the start of it. “It will be blown into bits and pieces,” says Morten Juhl, a producer who worked on Chestnut Man, a Danish drama that is currently sitting in Netflix's top ten most watched in the UK. “Things like the Squid Game going viral worldwide, that’s amazing. That just didn't happen a few years ago.”
So what’s changed? Simply put, the global TV industry has, since its inception, been dominated by American, and to a lesser extent, British shows. But now shows from anywhere – and in any language – have a chance at going viral. For those watching the industry, this change was no surprise. “It’s been a long time coming,” says Jack Thomas, an analyst at global TV consultancy 3Vision. “A lot of these streaming services have been beavering away making a lot of foreign language content.”
Since 2018, the majority of Netflix’s original scripted TV shows have been in a language other than English. In 2020 through 2021, that figure hit 55 per cent. Seamlessly offering foreign TV shows and films, released simultaneously worldwide, with easily accessible subtitles and dubs, has helped it to skyrocket in popularity. In the last two years, foreign language shows such as Money Heist, Kingdom or Dark have drawn huge worldwide audiences on Netflix, not to mention Lupin, which Netflix says was viewed by some 70 million households worldwide since it debuted in January.
“There is such a high demand for our content these days,” says Juhl. “And I think it's because we're doing local stuff.” He argues that the huge reach of streaming platforms has also helped improve the production values of non-English language content so it’s easier for international audiences to enjoy. But, within that, there’s also an understanding that local markets have a local look and feel. “They have understood that we shouldn't all be doing the same, we shouldn’t all be striving towards a Hollywood style or something, but actually keep our regional differences,” says Juhl.
The money helps. After opening a Paris production office and doubling its French language originals, the success of Lupin has sent Netflix on a renewed French-language spending spree. Then there’s the new offices and €500m of content investment in Germany, €200m investment in Italy and $300m in Mexico. The list goes on. On top of that, Netflix is aiming to break its way into making original anime content – recently announcing new partnerships with four major studios.
Its biggest plans are in India. Currently, Netflix is estimated to only have five million subscribers in the country, with Amazon Prime on around 17 million and Disney+ Hotstar (a joint venture between Disney and a local company) has around 34 million. To try and match its competitors in the region Netflix has promised to invest at least $400m, while producing 41 original Indian productions in 2021 alone. “That's not just to appeal to potential Indian subscribers, but also because Indian content is exportable to a lot of the Asian countries,” says Simon Murray, the head of Digital TV Research, who explains that of the 52 million more subscribers predicted to be gained by Netflix by 2026, some 19 million will be from the Asia-Pacific region.
But beyond changing audience tastes and streaming platform strategies the globalisation of local TV shows will have other effects, too. A world where original content is viewed irrelevant of its home nation, the need for remakes of programmes becomes less and less viable. Take Israel as an example. Historically, the country has created an array of original TV shows that end up becoming the basis for popular English remakes, like Homeland or Your Honour. But just this year Apple TV+ bought the rights to Israeli programming such as Tehran or Losing Alice, not to remake, but to produce and air in their original form.
Some of those changes are more political than creative. It isn’t a coincidence that so many viral foreign language TV shows such as Squid Game or Kingdom have come from South Korea. For decades, the country’s government has invested heavily in its cultural industries. South Korea has earmarked one per cent of national spending since 1994 for subsidies and low-interest loans to cultural industries. Its cultural content office, which helps nurture Korean TV, music, fashion and more, now has an annual budget of $5.5 billion, and spends hundreds of millions of dollars to export Korean culture abroad.
The belief was that it would create a ‘Hallyu’ – or Korean wave – where the market for Korean cultural products would skyrocket globally, as well as give the country a way to assert soft political power across the world. And that wave is getting pretty big, with the K-pop industry alone valued at billions of dollars annually and growing at record rates each year. Thomas says it’s “inevitable” that more and more countries will follow in South Korea’s footsteps – and some already are. Earlier this year, Spain announced similar plans to invest some $1.9bn into strengthening its film and TV industries.
Those decades of state investment in South Korean culture means Squid Game didn’t come from nowhere – and it’s also part of the reason why Netflix has been pumping cash into the local creative industries. Between 2016 and 2020 the streaming giant spent $700m on Korean content. This year alone it plans to spend $500m – a 285 per cent rise in annual spending.
But this drive to develop more and more global hits in local markets creates a few problems. For one, translating shows often leaves a lot lost in translation. Even Squid Game has been accused of having “botched” English subtitles that fail to convey a lot of the wider criticisms of inequality and wealth disparity that were expressed in the original Korean. But more than that, by creating shows that no longer just cater to a domestic audience but a global one, writers, directors and producers have to walk a fine line between making a show that authentically reflects the unique culture of the country they’re from while not making it so niche as to only appeal to those with a complete understanding of that country.
As films and TV become more global, the risk of trying to please the entire planet could mean many local shows end up pleasing nobody. Men In Black: International, for example, was panned by critics after the dialogue and scripts were simplified to make them easier to dub for foreign audiences. Netflix isn’t immune to such criticism and has been accused of creating shows to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, and creating content based on algorithms rather than cultures.
“The thing about creating original shows is that they can tailor make them to fit into an algorithm,” says Tom Hemingway, from the department of film and television studies at the University of Warwick. “But it feels a bit off, it’s sort of empty in a way.” The risk, Hemingway adds, is that local film and TV production companies may try to build something to “go viral or tick boxes”. It’s the sort of thinking that led to Netflix spending millions on new Adam Sandler movies after noticing that existing releases proved hugely popular with audiences.
For Chestnut Man, Juhl explains the struggle was to create a show that was very Danish while also being accessible enough so that anyone, anywhere, could understand at least 80 per cent of it. And while he says that Netflix offered advice and notes on how to make the show more accessible for international audiences, it didn’t forcefully change or compromise the programming. “They were always working from the project out and not the other way around,” he says. “That gave us the opportunity to do what we're best at. The core creative vision of the Chestnut Man was never brought into discussion.” And that, right there, is the secret to the success of Squid Game – but also what makes it such a hard thing to replicate. Netflix might have all the data in the world, but there’s still no magic formula for global domination.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK