On December 19, 2024, Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson released the first two episodes of his megahit Beast Games. It has since become Prime Video’s most-watched unscripted TV show, with more than 50 million viewers. The winner took home a $10 million cash prize, the largest reality TV payout in history. MrBeast runs YouTube’s biggest channel, targeted toward young adults. Unsurprisingly, Beast Games is marketed as a family friendly show in the vein of American Ninja Warrior or The Amazing Race.
That’s why I was surprised to see that the show’s main cultural reference point (more on this later) is the Korean series Squid Game, a hyperviolent Netflix hit that tells the fictional story of exorbitantly wealthy Koreans using a massive cash prize to manipulate exorbitantly poor Koreans into playing life-and-death remixes of children’s games. The show critiques predatory entertainment and highlights the corrupting nature of materialism and greed. It gives gruesome expression to the truth that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Tim. 6:10).
MrBeast not only seems to have missed the social critiques of Squid Game but has taken them one step further and inverted them. Beast Games doesn’t challenge greed, materialism, or predatory entertainment. It revels in them. Despite being billed as clean fun for the whole family, it teaches a twisted message: The love of money is the root of great entertainment.
What’s the Drama Driver of Beast Games? Money
Beast Games takes most of its aesthetic cues from Squid Game: Players wear numbered shirts. Guards wear masks with strange symbols. MrBeast dresses like Squid Game’s chief villain. But the most unsettling comparison is the way the games simulate death. MrBeast drops hundreds of contestants to their fake deaths. He allows players to run trains into dummy versions of contestants (and edits trailers to make it look like the dummies are real). He hires a team of Navy Seals to hunt contestants on a private island.
But the goal isn’t to make violence a theme. Instead, the fake violence almost always underlines the show’s main question: What would you do for money? That’s because money—and the happiness it promises—is Beast Games’s theme.
Beast Games doesn’t challenge greed, materialism, or predatory entertainment. Instead, it revels in them.
After all, the games themselves aren’t terribly entertaining: block stacking, catching balls falling through grates, and third-grade trivia. Likewise, MrBeast isn’t funny or charming enough to make the show interesting. He mostly shouts about money: “I can’t believe you’re not taking the money!” “No one has ever given away so much money!” The contestants are always shown either yelling about how much they want money or crying because they lost money. Oh, and at the center of almost every set piece is, of course, piles of money.
Money drives the drama of Beast Games. Getting rich is the contestants’ aspiration. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the only viewer participation the show invites is entering a sweepstakes for money. But there’s one big problem: The company MrBeast partnered with for the sweepstakes is a skeezy fintech corporation that specializes in predatory lending. The AP reported that the sweepstakes was designed to “trap needy users in earnings-depleting borrowing cycles with additional fees.” The fact that MrBeast’s audience is primarily children and young adults makes the whole scheme icky beyond belief.
Some readers might demur: Don’t most reality TV shows include a cash prize? Yes. But money is rarely the dramatic driver of those shows. It’s the people on Survivor or The Amazing Race who compel interest. The contestants’ relationships, problem solving, athleticism, and ingenuity make the show interesting. We know that people are the drama because the people are actually named in those shows. They’re humanized. But that’s rarely the case in Beast Games. Instead, the show objectifies its contestants—just like villains do in Squid Game.
Objectifying Contestants in Beast Games and Squid Game
Contestants in Beast Games are rarely named. They’re numbered and (mostly) referred to by numbers. In the first two episodes, the show doesn’t tell the backstory of one contestant. Viewers picked this up. If you search YouTube for reactions to the show, contestants are almost always referred to by their numbers, not their names.
The primary human experiences Beast Games depicts are greed and anguish. I don’t know if I’ve ever watched a show that lingered so long on so many devastated faces. The little personal information included implies many contestants come from troubled socioeconomic backgrounds. Multiple contestants reveal they’ve gambled their real-world jobs to compete because they need the money. You can’t be certain, but it seems like the show’s editors want viewers to think they’ve found analogs to the impoverished contestants in Squid Game—whether or not that’s the case.
A charitable read is that MrBeast simply missed Squid Game’s critique of predatory entertainment, greed, social stratification, and materialism. A less charitable view is that he intentionally turned it upside down. After all, his show celebrates everything Squid Game critiques. And in doing so, he makes undiscerning viewers complicit.
How We Become Mammonian Villains
The villains of Squid Game are masked billionaire “VIPs” whose entertainment is watching poor people battle to the death for the opportunity to get rich. MrBeast’s show turns his viewers into VIPs. We anonymously watch struggling people fight to the (fake) death for millions of dollars. To us, the players are mostly numbers, not people. They’re objects for our entertainment. They’re depersonalized psychological experiments.
This is anathema to a Christian anthropology. The Bible teaches that all humans are made in God’s image, worthy of immeasurable honor and dignity. There’s nothing dignifying or humanizing about how Beast Games portrays its contestants.
MrBeast often repeats, “I like to give stuff away and make people happy,” but his show exemplifies a twisted sort of generosity. As he said of one episode’s challenge, this “might be the most cutthroat thing [he’s] ever done.”
Beast Games is the sort of show one might cook up if the goal was to illustrate the opposite of Christ’s teaching to “take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15). Jesus followed this up with a parable about a “rich fool” who stores up treasure on earth instead of treasure in heaven (vv. 16–34). When we uncritically indulge in shows like Beast Games (especially with children), are we training ourselves to treasure the wrong kind of wealth?
When we uncritically indulge in shows like Beast Games (especially with children) are we training ourselves to treasure the wrong kind of wealth?
It’s a sign of spiritual atrophy when Christians can easily identify the objectionable nature of Squid Game’s violence or Game of Thrones’s pornography but not the immorality of MrBeast’s materialistic, greed-saturated, money-loving, brain-rotting reality show. What the New Testament says about sexual ethics and violence should inform how we engage with entertainment. But Jesus’s teachings on the dangers of loving money are, perhaps, even more broadly controversial in our cultural moment, which is precisely why we may be so blind to the immorality of shows that indulge it.
We’re too deeply acculturated by a social order dripping with the caustic idolatry of the almighty dollar.
Jesus taught a different way. A better way. He warned that aspiring unto mammon is aspiring unto death; you cannot serve God and money, so choose wisely (Matt. 6:24). If you’re going to watch Beast Games, do it with a critical eye. The idolatry of wealth is too easy for us to miss, which is all the more reason to be on guard against its allure.
The Gospel Coalition