At over 95 million subscribers and counting, MrBeast is the 2nd most popular YouTuber in 2022 and makes videos that consistently garner tens of millions of views—but what is his most-watched video to date"
Fueling his philanthropic stunts, MrBeast gets his money mainly from brand deals on his giveaway videos and earns over $50 million in YouTube revenue (via Forbes). His videos usually center around stunts and challenges, with his more popular videos involving players keeping their hands on a Lamborghini for a chance to win it, sitting in a bathtub full of snakes for $10,000, and earning $100,000 after swimming with sharks. Throughout his videos, MrBeast will also include mini-giveaways for his viewers, such as a chance to earn thousands of dollars if a viewer subscribes within an allotted time frame. In addition to his main channel, MrBeast hosts four other channels for shorts, gaming videos, reactions, and miscellaneous videos.
However, of all the videos with multi-million view counts that he's made, MrBeast's most viewed video by far is "$456,000 Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, which beat MrBeast's Squid Game record of 43 million views with a staggering 59 million hits.
It's no wonder that MrBeast's Squid Game replication received so much attention. The video was ed only two months after Squid Game and was very much still in the cultural zeitgeist. At the time of the MrBeast video release, Squid Game had over 2 billion viewed hours, with a record-breaking 1.65 billion hours being earned in its first month of release (via CNET). Despite its violent nature, Squid Game's high stakes challenge-after-challenge premise was perfect fodder for a MrBeast video.
MrBeast congratulates the video's winner for winning the "very first Squid Game in real life ever," which opens up the possibility of a second recreation around season 2, which is already teasing challenges for its characters to face. This isn't for certain, but considering how highly Squid Game season 2 will surely perform, it's reasonable to believe. Squid Game benefits from establishing that the game exists yearly, for it opens up the possibility for an indefinite number of future seasons and, consequentially, MrBeast video recreations.