[imagesource:  Youngkyu Park / Netflix / AFP / Getty Images]

When a movie crushes it at the box office, it’s easy to calculate the money it has raked in.

You just take worldwide ticket sales and voila, you can work out the five highest-grossing movies of all time.

(2009’s Avatar tops that list with $2,85 billion in ticket sales. Saved you a click.)

It’s a little more difficult to quantify the financial impact of a movie or series that comes from a streaming service, which is the case with Netflix and its smash hit, Squid Game.

You know a show has made it big when everybody’s drawing their Halloween costume inspiration from it, but there is a way to crunch the numbers.

Bloomberg reports that the “megahit” will create almost $900 million (around R13 billion) in value for Netflix:

…the company does have a wealth of data concerning what its customers watch, which the company uses to determine the value derived from individual programs.

“Squid Game” stands out both for its popularity, and its relatively low cost. The South Korean show, about indebted people in a deadly contest for a cash prize, generated $891.1 million in impact value, a metric the company uses to assess the performance from individual shows.

The show cost just $21.4 million to produce — about $2.4 million an episode. Those figures are just for the first season, and stem from a document that details Netflix’s performance metrics for the show.

A return of more than 40 times the production cost is pretty unreal.

For comparison, it’s estimated that Avatar cost around $237 million to make, meaning it generated a return of around 12 times the budget.

As of two days ago, roughly 132 million people had watched at least two minutes of Squid Game in just over 20 days since its release, which smashes the previous record set by Bridgerton.

In the case of “Squid Game,” Netflix estimates that 89% of people who started the show watched at least 75 minutes (more than one episode) and 66% of viewers, or 87 million people, have finished the series…

All told, people have spent more than 1.4 billion hours watching the show, which was produced by closely held Siren Pictures.

That’s almost as many hours as people spend trying to decide what to watch on Netflix, before falling asleep on the couch with remote in hand.

Another number that’s worth crunching is how much prize money is actually up for grabs in Squid Game.

Sure, you’ve seen that it’s 45,6 billion won, but how much is that really? Using Monday morning’s exchange rate, Collider worked out that equates to $38,1 million, or £32,9 million, or just north of R660 million.

I’ll stick to buying lottery tickets, but that’s definitely enough money to encourage some terrible life choices.

[sources:bloomberg&collider]