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Hollywood’s Hero of the Year Is… Bela Bajaria

Bela Bajaria
Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images
Matthew Belloni
December 26, 2021

You don’t need me to tell you that Squid Game was the biggest piece of professionally-created entertainment this year. Those staggering numbers—sampled by 142 million accounts in 90 countries (and finished by 87 million of them) in its first 23 days; 1.5 billion hours viewed in its first 28 days; the kind of global fandom usually reserved for soccer stars and Avengers movies—speak for themselves. The nine-episode, South Korean sci-fi thriller that Netflix bought for $22 million has created $900 million in value, according to internal documents that were revealed in October by Bloomberg, and its stars became subjects of everything from TikTok memes to Halloween costumes to a talent agency frenzy to sign them.

What’s most interesting to me isn’t that Squid Game happened, it’s that this kind of foreign super-breakout was inevitable, and that television success in the future will be defined mostly on these global terms. Anyone paying even casual attention can see what happened in 2021 as a flashing signpost of where this is all headed: Huge investments in local-language programming lead to mainstream-able hits that can be algorithmically promoted to a global audience that’s trained to embrace subtitles and foreign actors; that, in turn, will create nearly instant, exponential growth in consumption of that content. In other words: Massive f-ing hits. And hits translate into subscribers, perpetuating the virtuous cycle.