Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 10, 2023
As we cross the 100-day mark in the WGA strike, it’s worth noting that earlier this year, Netflix announced it would be investing $2.5 billion in South Korean content. There’s a reason for this investment: South Korean content is highly popular on its service, with around 60 percent of American subscribers sampling at least one South Korean series in 2022, and it’s also very affordable. Labor is inexpensive, meaning actors and writers are paid less. Additionally, the actors receive no residuals. The Korean Actors Union has attempted to negotiate better salaries and residuals for its actors, but Netflix is ghosting them.
Consider that while I remind you that Squid Game, the most popular original series in Netflix history, earned the streamer nearly $900 million while costing only $21 million to make. Many of the actors on the series were paid the minimum day rate of $300.
As the most popular original series of all time, subscribers watched 1.6 billion hours of Squid Game in the first 28 days of its release, generating $900 million in revenue.
Suits, meanwhile, recently racked up 3.1 billion hours watched in one week. That’s twice the amount of hours watched for Squid Game in a month. The week after Suits broke the record with 3.1 billion hours watched, it broke its own record with 3.7 billion hours watched.
Ethan Drogin wrote one of the first-season episodes of Suits. As he tells The Los Angeles Times, he received $259 for that work in the last quarter. The entire amount of royalties paid to the six writers for the first season of Suits was less than $3,000 in the last quarter.
Netflix, which earned $900 million for 1.6 billion hours of Squid Game watched in 28 days, has paid a grand total of $3,000 for the first season of a series that has been watched for 6.8 billion hours in two weeks. In what other profession can you be responsible for generating so much money and yet earn so very little in exchange?
