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Netflix has reportedly shut down the US spinoff it had been developing off the back of 'Squid Game.' The project, known internally by the working title 'Heckler,' had been in the works for several years before the streamer decided not to move forward, according to trade reports.

The spinoff was set to be directed by David Fincher, the filmmaker behind 'Fight Club,' 'Zodiac' and 'Gone Girl,' with the script written by Dennis Kelly, known for the series 'Utopia.' While conceived as a US production, reports had suggested filming could actually begin in the UK before the end of the year.

The moment that stoked the most speculation came in last year's Season 3 finale, when Lee Byung-hun's Front Man character watches actress Cate Blanchett playing ddakji, a Korean paper-tossing game, in an alley in Los Angeles. The show's creator was quick to clarify the scene wasn't a direct tie-in to the spinoff, and it was never confirmed that Blanchett was actually attached to 'Heckler.' She has only said that a return to the franchise remains a possibility.

Behind the cancellation is a series of leadership changes at Netflix that reshuffled the company's franchise priorities. Fincher himself has reportedly been tied up with a separate project starring Brad Pitt, further sapping the spinoff's momentum. Netflix is said to be leaning toward country-specific versions rather than one English-language US spinoff, though no regional follow-up is currently in active development.

'Squid Game,' led by Lee Jung-jae and Lee Byung-hun, remains one of Netflix's flagship hits, with Seasons 1 through 3 drawing cumulative viewership of 265.2 million, 192.6 million and 145.8 million respectively — among the strongest numbers ever for a non-English-language title. The show became the first Korean production to win at the Critics' Choice Awards in 2022 and picked up multiple Emmy wins that same year. Its creator is now developing a new crime drama centered on gambling.

Girl group aespa took over Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul's Guro District for two nights, marking the first time the quartet has headlined the venue on its own. The August 7-8 shows kicked off the group's fourth world tour, and combined attendance across both nights reached 35,000. Over roughly two and a half hours each night, the group ran through 27 songs.

The tour is titled 'SYNK: Complexity,' built around the world of their second studio album 'Lemonade,' released in May. The show unfolded in five chapters around a story in which cracks form between parallel universes, pitting the members' virtual avatar selves against their real ones. Video interludes depicting the members' inner turmoil ran between songs to carry the narrative through.

After a run of high-energy performances that leaned heavily on the new album, each member took the stage solo for the first time. Karina delivered a groove-heavy R&B number, Winter leaned into her lower register for a confident solo, Giselle performed a track she helped write, and Ningning sang a ballad backed by a live orchestra. Paired unit stages also debuted that night and were released as tracks the following evening.

The set closed with a run of fan favorites spanning from the group's debut single to its most recent hits, drawing roars from the crowd, while a mobile stage shaped like a can of Lemonade rolled out toward the audience several times during the show. Members told the crowd they never imagined filling a venue this size and promised to keep growing.

With Seoul behind them, aespa heads into a 25-city world tour spanning Taiwan, Brazil, and stops across the Americas and Europe. Now in their seventh year since debut, the run is being read as a marker of the group's expanding global reach.

YG Entertainment's four-member girl group BLACKPINK is holding a small-scale fan event at the National Museum of Korea in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, on August 8 — the 10th anniversary of the group's formation. Early scheduling notices suggested only some members might be able to attend, sparking concern among fans, but the agency has now confirmed that all four — Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé, and Lisa — will be there together.

Getting to this point wasn't smooth. Despite the milestone anniversary, the group initially unveiled little beyond a merchandise collaboration with the museum, disappointing fans hoping for a bigger celebration. When a fan event was finally announced, its 40-person cap drew further criticism for being too small for such a landmark occasion. Speculation about a possible no-show intensified after Rosé was spotted in Los Angeles, but her solo agency moved to quash the rumors, saying the date had been locked in as a top priority for a long time.

Formed in 2016, BLACKPINK has built global recognition through a string of hits and world tours. Their second full-length album, released in 2022, topped both the US Billboard 200 and the UK Official Albums Chart. In February of this year, the group reunited for a new album — its first as a complete unit in three years and five months. For the 10th anniversary, BLACKPINK also partnered again with the National Museum of Korea on a heritage-themed merchandise line, continuing a collaboration the two have built over time.

Separately, an unrelated incident made headlines just before the fan event. On August 6, a woman in her 20s was arrested at YG's headquarters in Hapjeong-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul, after allegedly smashing the building's glass entrance doors with a golf club. Police are investigating the motive; no direct connection to the fan event has been confirmed.

YG Entertainment has posted 69 performance videos on YouTube over the years, and combined, they've pulled in 7 billion views. Add in choreography practice clips and the total library of related content climbs past 170 videos. Every one of them, reportedly, was planned, choreographed and edited under the direct hand of producer Yang Hyun-suk.

This format is a different animal from a music video. Instead of leaning on storytelling, it uses editing to spotlight the texture and craft of the choreography itself — a way to showcase moves that a three-minute music video can't fully capture. YG leaned into the strategy from Blackpink's 2016 debut onward, with global fan growth on YouTube specifically in mind.

Yang started out as a professional dancer before debuting in 1992 as a member of Seo Taiji and Boys, where he personally choreographed every track on the group's first four albums. He later created the moves for Big Bang's 'Lies' and 'Last Farewell,' and 2NE1's 'Fire.' By the time Blackpink debuted, his process had evolved — he'd review work from top international choreographers and cut and adapt the parts he liked best.

The payoff has been clearest with Blackpink. Performance videos of group and solo stages have pulled hundreds of millions of views apiece among international fans, and the group recently hit 100 million YouTube subscribers. YG says it plans to bring the same level of polish to content for Treasure, Babymonster and future rookie groups.

On opening day, a multiplex in Yongsan, Seoul, sold out every IMAX showtime from early morning until midnight. Demand was so intense that the booking site briefly slowed down when tickets went on sale, and prime seats resold on secondhand platforms for several times face value. And this isn't a one-movie phenomenon.

Even in the first half of the year, before this release, admissions to special-format theaters were climbing fast. While overall moviegoing has plateaued, the share of audiences opting for premium formats keeps growing. Moviegoers in their 30s and 40s make up more than half of that crowd, but viewers in their 20s and younger — raised on YouTube and streaming — account for more than a quarter. Even as the total number of theaters fell by roughly 20 last year, the number of special-format screens grew by nearly 80, and their share of total box office revenue climbed from the high single digits into the low teens.

Behind the trend are big-budget films built from the ground up for giant screens. The new release was shot almost entirely — all 172 minutes — on a single IMAX film camera, delivering an unusually sharp image, and an upcoming Marvel release was designed from the start to use a triple-screen format. The same signal is showing up across the Pacific: America's largest multiplex chain saw attendance rise more than 13% year over year, posting its best quarterly revenue ever.

Still, special-format revenue leans heavily on Hollywood blockbusters — a dependency that showed up in past years when a thin slate of major international releases dragged premium-format box office down with it. But big budgets aren't a prerequisite: one low-budget Korean film, made for roughly 3 billion won (about $2.2 million), became the first Korean live-action feature to use a four-screen format, drawing attention despite its modest scale.

Samsung Electronics took the stage at FMS 2026 — the world's largest memory and storage trade show, held over three days in California — to unveil a concept model of its next-generation zHBM memory architecture, a world first. The show ran August 4-6, and Samsung filled its booth with more than 30 products spanning DRAM, NAND and storage, all displayed inside a booth designed to resemble an AI cloud server.

zHBM breaks from the traditional approach of placing memory chips beside a GPU or AI accelerator. Instead, it stacks memory directly on top of the processor. Samsung says the design should deliver 4x to 8x the performance and more than 3x the power efficiency of HBM5, the eighth-generation standard that hasn't reached mass production yet. Thermal resistance — a measure of how much heat builds up — is expected to drop by more than half, and Samsung said it can customize the interlayer between the memory and accelerator for individual customers, adjusting capacity and performance to spec.

At the same event, Samsung also debuted the V10 BV NAND, a new flash memory chip stacked beyond 400 layers — another world first. The chip combines a technique that manufactures cells and circuits separately before bonding them vertically, wafer bonding, and a three-way split manufacturing process, boosting memory density 58% over the prior generation. Samsung also introduced zNAND-O, a structure that stores only the frequently accessed portions of large AI model data on NAND flash, which the company says can cut memory build costs to roughly one-sixth of current levels without sacrificing performance.

In the show's keynote, a Samsung DRAM development executive noted that token volumes used in AI inference have jumped more than 100-fold over the past two years amid the spread of agentic AI, making memory a key bottleneck in AI systems. Samsung Executive Vice President Lee Jin-yeop said Samsung is the only company that spans memory, logic chips, foundry and advanced packaging, and that it plans to use that breadth to offer integrated solutions across the entire AI semiconductor stack.