KNORR x NETFLIX

One bowl of Knorr Korean Ramen. Sixty seconds. A masked Frontman gives a hall full of players in green tracksuits the rule, and the pink guards at the door make it clear what happens to anyone who does not finish.

Dare to Slurp is the launch film for Knorr's limited-edition Squid Game Season 2 ramen range, made with Netflix India ahead of the series returning on 26 December 2024. Written by Talented and directed by Atul Kattukaran for First December Films, it borrows the show's arena, its doll, its timer and its uniforms, then hands the last line to Gulshan Grover. The 40-second cut on the Knorr India YouTube channel has passed 60 million views.

At a glance

• Brand: Knorr Korean Ramen (Hindustan Unilever)
• Partner: Netflix India, Squid Game Season 2
• Agency: Talented
• Production house: First December Films
• Director: Atul Kattukaran
• Featuring: Gulshan Grover as the Frontman
• Launch: 9 December 2024 on the Knorr India YouTube channel
• Running time: 1 min 30 sec, plus a 40-second cut
• Reach: 60.6 million views for the 40-second cut and 307,000 for the full film on Knorr India's channel by September 2026

The brief

Knorr had put a Korean Ramen range into Indian kitchens in 2023. A year on, the brand had a much bigger card to play: an official tie-up with Netflix around Squid Game Season 2, and three limited-edition flavours in Squid Game packs, Jjajangmyeon, Spicy Kimchi and Gochujang Chicken. A QR code on every pack opened a Dare to Slurp game, with a trip to Seoul and a place at a Squid Game fan event as the prize.

The campaign idea rested on a cultural gap. In Korea, slurping noodles loudly is a compliment to the cook. In India it is bad manners. Knorr wanted to make the slurp the whole point of the product, and to do it inside the show's world without producing something that looked like a trailer with a pack shot.

Priyanka Ganguly, Head of Foods and Food Services at Hindustan Unilever, put the opportunity plainly: "Korean is a cultural phenomenon trending in India and with our Korean Ramen launch last year, we entered an exciting new space." Poornima Sharma, Head of Marketing Partnerships at Netflix India, said the collaboration "takes the Squid Game experience a notch higher and beyond the screen".

So the film had two audiences to satisfy at once. Squid Game fans, who would check every borrowed detail against the series. And everyone else, who needed a challenge they could understand from a single sentence, and a reason to buy noodles at the end of it.

The idea: the game is the product demonstration

The script does not explain the partnership. It drops you into the next game.

• A high wide over the arena: rows of numbered players in green tracksuits on a marked floor, the glass piggy bank hanging above them, the Frontman and two pink guards framed in the tube-lit archway.
• The Frontman sets the rule. Finish this bowl of Knorr Korean Ramen in 60 seconds. If you fail, you will be eliminated.
• The players slurp for their lives from black Knorr bowls: number 119, a curly-haired kid; 023, a bearded man in glasses; 205, a grey-bearded veteran; 411, a woman who tips the bowl straight into her mouth.
• A timer built into the white tiled wall counts down in red. 00:40.
• Red light. Young-hee's giant eyes fill the frame and the entire hall freezes mid-slurp, noodles hanging from chopsticks. Game pause, 00:12.
• Green light. 00:11. The slurping resumes at double speed.
• The piggy bank fills, not with cash but with packs of Knorr Korean Ramen.
• The Frontman takes off his mask. Under the hood is Gulshan Grover. "Frontman? No. Bad Man." Then the dare: would you dare to slurp Knorr Korean Ramen?
• End card: the three packs and the line Dare to Slurp, then the Netflix ident.

The rule of the game is the product claim. Sixty seconds and one bowl tells you the noodles are hot, spicy and worth fighting over, and nobody has to say the word flavour. The red light freeze is the one open joke about the show. Everything around it is played dead straight, which is why the freeze lands.

Between the Frontman's instruction and the reveal, roughly seventy seconds, nobody speaks a line. The soundtrack is slurping, the red light and green light calls, and music in the register of the series. Press coverage called it a Slurp-cappella, and that is a fair description of how the middle of the film is held together.

The product demonstration and the game are the same thing. The only way to survive the film is to eat the noodles.

Casting the Bad Man

The Frontman is the show's authority figure, a voice behind a mask. The film keeps him that way for eighty seconds, then spends the mask on a reveal. Gulshan Grover has been Hindi cinema's villain of choice for decades, and Bad Man is the nickname audiences gave him. He does not have to sell the line. He only has to say it, and the film gives him the hood, the tube light and the pause to do it in.

The credit sheet shows how much weight that one beat carried: Grover had his own costume stylist, Rashi Verma, and his own hair and make-up artist, Ambika Kukrety, separate from the main team under Trushala Nayak and Karan Singh.

The rest of the cast is a crowd that had to read as individuals. Each player gets a single close-up in the slurping montage, and each one is a different way of losing at noodles: the frantic, the methodical, the man who has clearly done this before.

The shoot

The arena is a build. Production designer Teena Paradkar's set gives the film the white tiles, the floor markings, the arched doorway lit by bare tubes, the hanging piggy bank and a countdown clock sunk into the wall, all of it close enough to the series to satisfy a fan and clean enough to hold a Knorr green logo in the corner. A pack maker, Ismail, is credited on the crew list, which tells you how many ramen packs it took to fill the piggy bank at the end.

The mass slurp and the red light freeze are staged movements, and the crew list has a choreographer, Vithal Patil, and an action director, Danish Gomes, for them. A food stylist, Swati, kept the ramen looking hot and red on camera. Yash Khanna shot it, with a jib and a Steadicam on the sheet, and both are visible in the finished film: the high wide over the arena and the drift along the rows of slurping players.

A separate socials unit, directed by Amit Upadhyay with Pritesh Patel on camera, worked the same set, so the campaign had vertical and behind-the-scenes material from one production.

Post and sound

Priyank Prem Kumar cut the film, Nube Studio graded it, and Rohit Padwal at After Studios handled the online. The grade holds the series palette, teal walls and pink guards, while letting the noodles read red in every bowl.

Joseph George designed and mixed the sound, and the sound is the film's engine. The slurps are layered until a hall of people eating becomes a rhythm, the red light and green light chants land as a beat, and the timer ticks under it all. A 40-second cut of the film did most of the campaign's watching.

Where it sat in the campaign

• 9 December 2024: Both cuts go live on the Knorr India YouTube channel, alongside the limited-edition packs.
• 12 to 18 December 2024: Launch coverage across afaqs, Best Media Info, MediaBrief, Medianews4u and Indian Television. Indian Television reported 10 million YouTube views in nine days.
• December 2024: Forty-five creators, including Orry, Uorfi, Falguni Pathak and Yashraj Mukhate, take the Dare to Slurp challenge, while rappers Big Deal, Yungsta, Yoki and Seige record exclusive tracks for YouTube, Spotify, Instagram and Facebook.
• 26 December 2024: Squid Game Season 2 releases on Netflix.
• January 2025: A split billboard in Juhu, Mumbai, with 3D noodles bridging a slurping player and a bowl.
• 2025: Shortlisted for Best Branded Content at the Festival of Media Global.

By September 2026 the 40-second cut had 60.6 million views on the Knorr India channel and the full film 307,000, against 86,000 on the First December Films upload.

What the film proves

This is the reference to reach for when a brief needs any of the following:

• a licensed entertainment property used as a world to play in, without the film becoming a trailer
• a product demonstration written as a game with rules, so the claim never has to be spoken
• a star cameo held back as the payoff rather than spent as a presenter
• a crowd film where every extra needs one readable close-up
• a set built to match a globally recognised design and still carry a brand
• a soundtrack built from the product itself
• a hero film, a cutdown and a socials unit delivered from one shoot

See more of our work, the director's reel and credits, or send us a script and a date.

Credits

• Client: Knorr, Hindustan Unilever
• Partner: Netflix India
• Agency: Talented
• Production house: First December Films
• Director: Atul Kattukaran
• Executive Producer: Ganesh Pareek
• Senior Producer: Imran Patel
• Producer: Ankit Singh
• Director of Photography: Yash Khanna
• Production Designer: Teena Paradkar
• Offline Editor: Priyank Prem Kumar
• Grade: Nube Studio
• Online: Rohit Padwal, After Studios
• Sound Design and Mix: Joseph George
• Featuring: Gulshan Grover