Meet the Netflix exec who greenlit 'Squid Game'

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October 21, 2021

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Sara Blakely sells a major Spanx stake, it’s Latina Equal Pay Day, and we meet Minyoung Kim, the Netflix executive who snapped up the ‘Squid Game’ script. Have a terrific Thursday.
– Giving the green light. Netflix on Wednesday confirmed that the survival thriller Squid Game is now its most popular show ever. Some 142 million households have watched the dystopian drama.
The success of the series from writer and director Hwang Dong-hyuk is a milestone for Korean and Asian storytellers, and—as my colleague Yvonne Lau reports—it’s a career-defining moment for Minyoung Kim, Netflix’s vice president of content in Asia (excluding India), who greenlit the show. Shortly after setting up Netflix’s Seoul office in 2018, the 18-year industry veteran and film nut snapped up the script that Hwang had been shopping around for a decade.
“[W]e were looking for shows that were different from what’s traditionally ‘made it’ and Squid Game was exactly it,” she told Yvonne.
Kim says Squid Game has “traveled” well beyond its domestic market because of its relatable characters—they’re grappling with debt in a hyper-capitalist society—easy-to-understand childhood games, and visually-stunning images.
Courtesy of Netflix Kim joined Netflix in 2016 after bouncing around the entertainment industry in Asia and Europe. The streaming giant gave Kim her dream job—”reading scripts, meeting creators and working with different types of people,” she says. Kim’s team in Asia has launched 80 Korean titles on Netflix and has plans for lots more. The streaming giant is investing $500 million in Korean content this year alone, nearly three-fourths what it’s spent in the country in the past four years combined.
As Netflix grapples with the fallout of the Dave Chappelle special (more on that below), Kim acknowledges that “there’s a long way to go” in fostering genuine equality in South Korea and the entertainment industry at large. She sees it as her mission to partner “with different types of creators to tell different stories, [whether] it’s those that have been traditionally successful or others from underrepresented groups.”
You can read Yvonne’s full story on Kim here.
Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman
The Broadsheet, Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women, is coauthored by Kristen Bellstrom, Emma Hinchliffe, and Claire Zillman. Today’s edition was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.

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"It is a gift to be a woman. That others may choose to suggest it is in any way less only shows their fear of your power."
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