Netflix reportedly abandons David Fincher's Squid Game show

Okay, but seriously: What the hell was up with that Cate Blanchett cameo at the end of the original series?

By William Hughes | August 6, 2026 | 10:38pm

Cate Blanchett in Squid Game, Screenshot: YouTube

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Netflix reportedly abandons David Fincher's Squid Game show

In the grand scheme of Netflix projects that blew up huge in their first season, and then seemed to fizzle and die in their second and third, it’s kind of hard to top Squid Game. The first season of Hwang Dong-hyuk’s blend of capitalist satire and “Watch people get shot for being bad at tag” action was a slow-growing sleeper hit when it landed as an import on the streamer in 2021, before briefly taking over basically all of American culture in the subsequent months. But despite a massive marketing push from a streamer clearly desperate to capitalize on its unlikely hit, the show’s return engagements in 2024 and 2025 didn’t have anything close to that same impact, largely falling out of the zeitgeist about 20 seconds after they were dumped in a big pile on Netflix. (Despite featuring at least a few stand-out episodes that stand up easily to anything from season 1.) That drop-off in excitement encompassed the once-interesting, if clearly also pretty fraught, possibility of director David Fincher helming his own Americanized project set in the Squid Game universe—a possibility we’ve all apparently now been spared, at least according to a new report from The Playlist.

Said report quotes unnamed sources at Netflix, who state that the streamer has now apparently lost interest in Heckler, the working title for Fincher’s US-set Squid Game show. Supposedly being written by Utopia creator Dennis Kelly, details on the Fincher-produced series were basically nil. (To the point that Hwang had to come out and say that the rather bizarre cameo from Cate Blanchett at the end of the original Squid Game, which saw the Oscar-winner appear as an American representative of the sinister games, wasn’t intended as a tease for the separate series.)

And, sure, the idea did make a certain kind of “so obvious it feels kind of dumb” sense, with Netflix pairing together one of the biggest names in its stable of creators with a show that, until about mid-2024, seemed like it was on track to dominate the conversation for years. But, like many of the projects Fincher has recently floated at Netflix—where he’s produced surprisingly little in the 2020s, give or take directing The Killer back in 2023—it also seemed permanently on the brink of evaporating.

For what it’s worth, Fincher does have a project currently gearing up at Netflix, one that at least temporarily seems to be maintaining his interest: The completed Quentin Tarantino side project The Adventures Of Cliff Booth, which Fincher directed, and which is set to debut on Netflix in December of 2026.

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