MrBeast’s video recreating Squid Game has amassed millions of views, but it completely misses the show's point. Squid Game follows 456 contestants as they compete in children's games to the death, vying for 45.6 million won. The show rose to fame after it's Netflix release in September 2021, and since then, recreations have taken place all over the world. The latest was by YouTuber MrBeast, but his version ignores a major theme of the show.
In October 2021, MrBeast announced he was going to host a real version of Squid Game. The replication took about $3.5 million to make, featuring detailed sets from the show, 456 contestants, and a $456,000 prize. The video was posted to YouTube on November 24, 2021. As of writing, the video has 121 million views and has been met with criticism. While the criticism varies, one of the most glaring problems with MrBeast’s Squid Game is that it misses the point of the show entirely.
MrBeast's Squid Game video, for all its largesse, lacks the critique of capitalism that makes the show so emotionally impactful. Given that this critique is central to Squid Game’s success, it is a glaring omission. Throughout the show, the financial struggles of characters are explored as an explanation for how they ended up at the deadly games. For some like Deok-su and Sang-woo, they are repaying debts, and for others like Sae-byeok, they’re trying to pay for a better life for their family. Every character’s actions, from joining the games to cheating to violent fighting, are financially motivated. The purpose of this is to show what destruction financial pressure can cause. In addition, the games being put on by an elite group of VIPs in animal masks for their amusement emphasizes the fact that money is a game for people who have a lot of it, but for those that don’t, lacking money is literally life or death. Removing Squid Game from the lens of capitalism makes it a show about people playing games and dying when they lose, gutting it of any deeper significance. This is exactly what MrBeast’s video is.
MrBeast’s video misses the point not only overall but also in its tiny details. For example, the contestants chosen in Squid Game come from financially difficult backgrounds, whereas MrBeast chose his contestants randomly from his followers, removing the stakes that make the original characters so compelling. In the final episode of Squid Game, Gi-Hun wins, but he realizes it wasn’t worth it; he goes home to no one and nothing, and he doesn’t touch any of his winnings for over a year. In the video, the final shot is MrBeast’s video's winner breaking open the piggy bank and pulling armfuls of money out. There was no lesson to MrBeast’s video; it was instead just a contest. Furthermore, the video, sponsored by Brawl Stars, presents a two-minute advertisement for the sponsor in the middle of one of the games, and the video is also monetized, flanked by advertisements before and after the video. By having a sponsored Squid Game, the video crudely engages in the system the show set out to criticize. In all of these instances, MrBeast’s video misses the point of Squid Game and is instead a shallow imitation featuring a couple of hundred people playing kids games.
At one point in the video, a contestant, shocked by the difficulty of the umbrella shape in Ppopgi (honeycomb), admits she hadn't seen the popular show Squid Game. In an ironic way, it’s possible that MrBeast’s Squid Game video is an unaware real-life example of the culture that the TV show was attempting to criticize. A group of people with access to a lot of money had other people compete at a series of games for a possibly life-changing sum of cash. While that’s not the point of his video, it’s an example of exactly what the show was warning against. MrBeast's Squid Game video could have brought the same message to viewers who weren't originally interested in the show. Instead, however, it ended as an advert for the system the show attempted to condemn.
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