The Squid Game becomes reality. In the popular Netflix series, the most watched in the history of the platform, 456 people with very little to lose agreed to participate in a competition based on children’s games with a macabre twist: the options were to survive or die.
The reward for whoever beat the games was 45.6 billion. Now, Netflix has decided to make that proposal a reality, although it is expected that without that macabre touch that made the series so addictive.
This Tuesday, the platform announced at the Banff World Media festival the start-up of the production of a program based on the series. Squid Game: The Challenge will feature 456 players competing in different games.
The winner after the 10 programs that will make up the competition will be able to win 4.56 million dollars. According to Netflix, it will be the biggest prize money to be put at stake in the history of television.
In ¡Boom!, the Antena 3 contest, Los Lobos won a jackpot of 4,130,000 euros in 2019, a prize that was then announced as the largest in history. The one that Netflix puts into play would overcome it.
The casting to participate in the program is now open on the website squidgamecasting.com, to which applicants from anywhere in the world can sign up, but they will have to speak and understand English.
In the series, the instructions for each game are given through loudspeakers, which makes it necessary for all players to understand English, although they can speak other languages as well (in the series, the instructions were given in Korean).
The tests will be inspired by those that appear in fiction, but will include variations and will be adapted to the circumstances, such as the number of players who pass each one of them.
Squid Game: The Challenge will be a co-production of Studio Lambert (which is in charge of another of the Netflix realities, The Circle) and The Garden, belonging to ITV Studios, and will be recorded in the United Kingdom.
The announcement came just a few hours after Netflix made the launch of the second season of the Korean fiction official, an announcement that was not surprising given the success of the first installment, which made this survival game drama the title most popular television program of 2021 and the most watched, in any language, in the history of the platform, with more than 1,650 million hours viewed in its first 28 days, according to data provided by Netflix itself.
The fourth season of Stranger Things, the first part of which premiered on May 27, is already the second most watched title on the platform, without yet managing to surpass the Korean’s global figures.
The competition that Netflix will produce based on the Squid Game will not be the first time that the concept of fiction is transferred to real life. The youtuber MrBeast already recreated the series tests with 456 people in November 2021. In that case, the prize was 456,000 dollars.