MrBeast's 'Squid Game' Recreation Accused Of Plagiarism

YouTuber Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson is in a spot of bother after his recreation of Netflix’s Squid Game has been criticised for being a shallow imitation of the original’s themes and storyline. 

And, if you also weren’t aware, water is wet. If you’ve not seen the show, it’s about a group of people who are struggling under the weight of serious debts until a mysterious man invites them to play a series of children’s games. If you win the games, you are entitled to the prize of 45.6 billion won. If you lose, you die. Horribly. Every death adds 100 million won to the winnings, and the power divide between the guards and the players encourages them to throw each other under the bus to ensure they have a shot at survival. 

Here's Squid Game in Roblox...

Back in 2009, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk had a plan for Squid Game to be a movie, but producers found it to be "too difficult to understand and bizarre" and the debt crisis in South Korea complicated the viability of the project. Of course, once Netflix had expanded into Asia, Hwang approached the company with his script and it was a stratospheric success. 

With a TikTok, Donaldson asked his followers for 10 million likes for him to give recreating the games of Squid Game a go. The video easily surpassed this target and he spent $3.5 million to build the arenas, recruit participants, fundraise a prize pool of $456,000, and film the whole thing for YouTube. At the time of writing, it has nearly 130 million views and 10 million likes. 

Praise for the sets and the spectacle surged in the comments section of the video, however, some aren’t so impressed. “It’s very unoriginal just to copy the popular thing and be ugly ostentatious about it with MAXIMUM MONEY for MAXIMUM VIEWS,” said one. “Not to mention he clearly DOESNT [sic] GET the themes of Squid Game and made a joke out of a show where 455 people die from avarice.”

“I'm sure Beast's video is fine, but its success is entirely dependent on work Squid Game's creators already did: conceptualizing, writing, producing, marketing, publishing, and popularizing an idea. Without all that, Beast doesn't have a video, much less 100+ million views,” added another. “So if you're going to say it took 10 years to make Squid Game, you must then be consistent and say that Beast's video took seven weeks PLUS 10 years to make.”

Topics: Netflix, Youtube