Killing Old People Club movie: Squid Game showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk courts controversy with new project

Fresh off the global success of Squid Game, the Netflix show’s writer/director/executive producer/showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk has revealed to Variety that he’s currently developing “another controversial film”. The project is called Killing Old People Club, or K.O. Club for short, and it’s inspired by a novel from Italian intellectual and essayist Umberto Eco. Eco is best known for writing the novel The Name of the Rose, which was turned into a film starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater in 1986.

Eco never wrote a novel titled Killing Old People Club, so it will take a fan who’s more familiar with his work to figure out which story has inspired this movie project.

Dong-hyuk told Variety that he has a twenty-five page treatment in place for Killing Old People Club, which he says

will be more violent than Squid Game.”

He also said he “might have to hide from old people” after the movie is released.

But before any of that happens, Dong-hyuk is heading home to South Korea, where he is going to write a second season of Squid Game. The idea is to get that season filmed and ready for release through the Netflix streaming service by the end of 2024.

The first season of Squid Game was originally envisioned as being a feature film, and Dong-hyuk wrote the initial screenplay in 2009. He kept it on a shelf until the Netflix era because it was “too violent and investors would have been worried”. Netflix was not worried about bringing the violence he had written to the screen. It turned out well for everyone involved, and even impressed Steven Spielberg. Dong-hyuk told Variety,

Steven Spielberg told me ‘I watched your whole show in three days and now I want to steal your brain! It was like the biggest compliment I ever got in my life because he’s my film hero. I grew up watching his movies.”

We’ll keep you updated on both Squid Game season 2 and the Killing Old People Club movie as the projects move forward.