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As Netflix’s hit survival drama Squid Game returns with its third season on June 27, an old controversy has resurfaced. In the shadows of its record-breaking success, Squid Game faces a plagiarism claim from Luck, a 2009 Bollywood thriller. Luck, a crime-action film starring Imran Khan and Sanjay Dutt, was a box-office flop. Its director, Soham Shah, alleges that Squid Game copied key plot elements from Luck. Netflix has flatly denied the accusation.
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2009 Film Luck and the Lawsuit
Luck tells of an underworld kingpin who recruits ‘lucky’ individuals into deadly games, a premise Squid Game fans have noted for similarity to the Korean series. In Luck, desperate, debt-ridden people are lured into a series of competitive challenges for a cash prize, only to discover that losing any challenge means death. The game’s jackpot grows larger with each fatality, and gamblers worldwide wager on the outcomes. The film’s lead, Shruti Haasan, even plays dual roles tied to avenging a sibling’s death, an element Shah and others compared to family-motivated plot threads in Squid Game. Despite its elaborate premise, Luck received tepid reviews and bombed at the Indian box office.
In September 2024, Soham Shah filed a federal lawsuit in New York against Netflix and Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk. The suit calls Squid Game a “blatant rip-off” of Luck. Shah notes that he wrote Luck’s story around 2006 and released the film in 2009, the same year Hwang claims to have conceived Squid Game. The lawsuit quotes Shah’s declaration that Squid Game’s “main plot, characters, themes, mood, setting and sequence of events… are strikingly similar to that of Luck,” suggesting such parallels can’t be mere coincidence.
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Luck and Squid Game Similarities
Both stories feature large groups of desperate contestants battling in deadly games for money. In Squid Game, 456 cash-strapped participants play perilous versions of children’s games for a 45.6 billion won prize. In Luck, the contestants are ostensibly chosen for their ‘luck’ and pit against each other in lethal gambles as gamblers bet on them. Crucially, losing means dying in both works, and each death swells the prize pool, a detail Shah’s lawsuit underscores.
Characters and subplots also invite comparison. For example, Luck included a heroine on a revenge mission for a slain twin. Squid Game similarly weaves in family-driven motives, notably, Season 1’s detective Jun-ho infiltrates the games searching for his missing brother. Both narratives exploit themes of survival, greed and the cruelty of rich onlookers betting on life-or-death contests.
Squid Game Season 3 Premiere and Legacy
All this unfolds as Squid Game’s third season premieres globally on Netflix today (June 27, 2025). The show remains Netflix’s most-watched series ever, over 142 million member households tuned into Season 1 in its first month. In Season 3, the story picks up with Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) re-entering the games, determined to end the deadly competition once and for all.
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Whether Squid Game’s final chapters will overshadow the Luck controversy or simply render it a footnote remains to be seen. For now, the debate spotlights how Squid Game’s gripping mix of high-stakes drama and social commentary resonates across cultures, even if its origins are being contested.
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Image Courtesy: IMDb
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