Steven Spielberg: Squid Game proves you don’t need big stars to be a hit

The TV event of 2021 was undoubtedly Squid Game, a South Korean import about impoverished people competing in a series of deadly games for the chance to win a huge pot of prize money, all of it masterminded by bored elites who enjoyed seeing people battle for their lives. The show was tense, inventive, and didn’t have a single star most people in the west were familiar with, but it became a massive hit for Netflix for anyway.

The fact that there were no big stars caught the attention of legendary director Steven Spielberg, who talked about it this weekend ahead of the Producers Guild of America Awards. “Squid Game comes along and changes the math entirely for all of us, he said per Deadline. “A long time ago it was domestic stars that brought the audience into movies. Today, it’s interesting, unknown people can star entire miniseries, can be in movies.”

Obviously you still see a lot of big stars in movies and TV shows — how many genre projects has Ryan Reynolds held down lately? — but it doesn’t seem as necessary as it used to be. That said, Spielberg still thinks it’s easier to sell your movie to studios if you get at least one well-known name involved. “They do need an anchor,” he said. “If there’s an anchor they’re familiar with you can surround them with lesser-known faces.”

Do movies and TV shows need big stars to be hits?

But again, Squid Game had virtually no big names and it was still a phenomenon, which is encouraging for people like Todd Black, a producer on Amazon’s Being the Ricardos. “It’s really wonderful to be able to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to have a star in a smaller role. I’m going to have an unknown in the lead role’ … Now, you can go to the streaming service or the studio and say, ‘Okay, well, I’ll get name the name to play for three days in this role but I’m going to go with a total unknown.’ Nine times out of 10 if the script is good enough and the budget is small enough, you can pull that off.”

Streaming has made the difference. Streamers are all in competition with each other for the best content; that can mean getting big actors, but it can also mean just telling great stories. It’s a good time to a TV fan.

As for Squid Game, Netflix is working on a second season, but we don’t know when it will premiere yet.

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