There is nothing like a good anti-capitalist utopian work for capitalism to be willing to get its claws on and distort its message. ‘The Squid Game’, the biggest hit in Netflix history, not only will it have a well-deserved second seasonbut, in addition, today it has been known that it will have a reality show in which 456 people will compete that they can take… 4.56 million dollars. Take utopia.
open casting
It must be said that it is not the highest number that has ever been distributed on television, but just barely: ‘Jeopardy!’ currently holds the world record. And in this case, Netflix is asking a lot more of the contestants. On their casting page, where there are different categories for American, British and global contestants, they ask you to you can shoot for four weeks in early 2023. Come on, unlike most Netflix reality shows, like ‘Insiders’, it seems that this one is going to be taken seriously.
The streaming itself warns -just in case- that people are not going to die here nor are they going to get hurt, but the winner will take the twine. With a fortune to the winner, who will be an ally, who will you trust, and who will betray you in the ultimate personality challenge? All this sounds a lot like a kind of massive ‘Survivor’ in which they better have everything measured to the millimeter: 4.56 million, plus the production itself, is a lot of money… And they’re already a little late.
YouTuber MrBeast has already made a life-size Squid Game with a more modest prize: $456,000. Preparing it cost him 3.5 million. The result? More than 257 million views on YouTube. There is no doubt that Netflix has seen a market share here and has jumped at it. Seeing the result of the company’s reality shows so far, which range from fun to mediocre, but always with a rather flat visual style, we will have to wait to see if They have learned their lesson by adapting ‘The Squid Game’ or it will be a simple ‘Guaypaut’ from Mercadona.