At the same time, Netflix released the long-awaited second season of Squid Game, a series that had already captured global attention in 2021. The comparison is natural. The South Korean series used gaming as a metaphor for desperation and economic inequality. It was a scathing critique of a system that pushes the weakest to compete to the point of exhaustion in order to survive. Beast Games, on the other hand, turns that dystopia into reality, removing any critical intent and openly celebrating competition and money as the primary goal.
points of Beast Games is the budget: 14 million dollars spent to build an entire artificial city, Beast City, designed as a set for the challenges. This extraordinary investment has c level executive list guaranteed the show a unique aesthetic and unprecedented spectacularity, but it is not without shadows. Some sources have reported allegations of difficult working conditions, with grueling pace and high pressure to meet construction and filming deadlines, casting a shadow on the ambitions of the project.
The show has attracted an impressive number of viewers, making it one of the most-watched programs on Amazon Prime Video in its launch week. The first episodes are estimated to have reached tens of millions of views worldwide, confirming Beast Games as an unprecedented commercial success in the game show landscape.
This impressive sum, which guarantees spectacularity to the show, raises moral questions. In a world marked by increasingly serious humanitarian crises, wars and inequalities, allocating such a sum to a television show seems almost offensive. It is impossible not to think of what is happening in Palestine, where people die every day due to a lack of basic resources, or of the millions of people in the world who live in conditions of extreme poverty. With that money, schools, hospitals or pilot projects on universal income could have been built, as has already been happening around the world for some time. Instead, it was used to entertain.