Hellbound is another Korean hit on Netflix that has planted itself as the number one series in a ton of regions around the world, and topped the charts for non-English hours viewed (43 million, more the Arcane’s 38 million on the English charts).
Naturally, that has led to questions about season 2 of Hellbound, and when and if it’s coming to Netflix. This kind of success makes that almost a guarantee, but director Yeon Sang-ho isn’t taking anything for granted. In an interview with Huffpost KR, he talked about season 2 for the first time:
“As a creator, Netflix is a good platform. There are no restrictions that come with being introduced first in Korea, so free planning is possible. It is also a great advantage and a new experience to be able to simultaneously release and see reactions in countries of different cultures.” he said. “It was my first work with Netflix and it was successful, but if I do it again with Netflix, I won’t take a similar approach, I will do something new.”
Even though he will “do something new,” Yeon Sang-ho does say he would want to do the same thing again where he had a webtoon of the series before he moved on to live action. He says the cartoon would be out some time in the second half of next year, implying Hellbound season 2 itself probably would not be out until 2023 at the earliest. That’s similar to Squid Game, where everyone is expecting a much longer break than a year between season 1 and season 2.
Netflix has found a huge amount of success with Korean series the past year or two. Squid Game is far and away the most prominent example as Netflix’s most popular series ever in any language by a huge margin, but it’s impressive to see other shows like Hellbound come up and put up massive numbers like this as well. Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha is another recent Korean hit in a bunch of countries. Before that, My Name, and so on and so forth.
Hellbound season 2 is a sure thing, that much is guaranteed even if there’s not a deal in place yet. The director is clearly pretty happy with the way things went with Netflix on this first project, so there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t have season 2 on Netflix, and no reason to think Netflix wouldn’t want to do season 2 with him. The show was not a miniseries, and did tease future potential developments in its finale, but we would have to see what “new” direction Yeon Sang-ho wanted to take this time around, which he seems to be indicating is the plan.
But yes, Korean shows are storming Netflix and I would expect multiple seasons of a whole lot of these to come, even if they take awhile to get here.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and its audiobook, and The Earthborn Trilogy, also on audiobook.
