MrBeast and companies keep missing what makes Squid Game so special

Squid Game remained as popular as ever after Season 2, once again netting viewership records at Netflix thanks to millions of viewers across the globe. Many companies and content creators have tried to piggyback off the series’ popularity, but as memorable as the series’ games are, these efforts miss the series’ point entirely.

Squid Game Season 1 brought in an international audience of 330 million viewers, with over 2.8 billion hours viewed since its September 2021 premiere (via Variety). That’s a massive international audience, and Season 2 has also landed exceptional viewership numbers since its initial release.

With that scale, it makes considerable sense why capturing that popularity is such a target for companies like the streamer Netflix, as well as others like MrBeast who have latched onto the color and larger-than-life drama of the game. These aren’t the source of the series’ popularity.

Squid Game is a tragic thriller about class, desperation & death

At face value, Squid Game has always been a perfect storm of ideas. Brightly colored children’s games turned deadly has both nostalgia and a touch of dark irony. Massive monetary prizes. Memorable characters backed by powerful performances.

The series’ massive international popularity never stemmed from ‘a series of colorful, whimsical games,’ however, but from their high stakes and the tragic relatability of the setup. At its core, it was an incisive critique of capitalism, where indebted players risk their lives from lack of other options.

Netflix

The series’ own origins hearkened back to creator Hwang Dong-hyuk’s time where, in a period of financial hardship, he was reading about death games while severely indebted.

“And well, I read some stories about these indebted people entering into these life-and-death games, and that became really immersive for me because I was struggling financially myself. I was even thinking that I would love to join a game like that, if it existed, to make a bunch of cash and get out of this terrible situation,” he explained.

Though a player like Thanos might enjoy them, the games have never been fun for the fictional players, and they weren’t intended to be. They’ve always been tragic, maybe infuriating, all packed within an ironically colorful package. Any project that forgets that entirely misses the point of the series.

Some shows you just can’t commodify (but everyone tries)

The series was inherently critical and tragic, and the games fatal and not fun for most of the competitors, clearly written around faceless billionaires having fun at poor folks’ expense, so you’d think it would be hard for the series to be commodified. That’s never stopped a company from trying.

All the way back in 2021, YouTube phenom and Beast Games creator MrBeast concocted his own reproduction of the series (absent, you know, the death). It broke major records, even finding praise from the Squid Game creator himself, but it didn’t escape a variety of criticisms, including that it missed the series’ point.

When Netflix created its own official Squid Game series with Squid Game: The Challenge, fans also criticized the streaming platform for missing the point of its own series. In defense, the game show’s producer called the series’ anti-capitalism “a very small part of the original Squid Game” despite the indebted desperation being the series’ entire premise in both seasons, demonstrating a misunderstanding of its premise and appeal.

Even Domino’s had recently gotten in on the action, teaming up with Netflix for Squid Game: The Experience. It stated, “Those who watch Netflix’s Squid Game know that losing is the ultimate emergency, but Domino’s is here to turn that around,” via an offer of free pizza for a year, and advertising an “emergency pizza.”

Free pizza’s great, sure. When players failed in Squid Game, they weren’t hungry, inconvenienced, or bummed… they died violently, sometimes in front of loved ones. Their organs were often harvested, and they were spoken of by the Recruiter like the poor victims were cattle.

Altogether, attempting to commodify Squid Game’s popularity hasn’t been plausible because the very popularity stems from the relatability of factors like the desperation that attends debt and the callousness of many wealthy individuals at the top.

These factors are obvious and nigh-universal under global capitalism, ergo the persistence of backlash whenever a company tries to set up colorful mock-death games. Perhaps it’s time to stop trying.