Mnet has announced an additional round of recruitments for its new boy group survival program, 'Boys Planet'.
A male-counterpart to the global girl group survival program 'Girls Planet 999', which gave birth to the project group Kep1er, 'Boys Planet' will be recruiting contestants from June 27 through August 21, 2022. Any male born before January 1, 2009 with a dream of becoming a global K-Pop idol can apply, regardless of nationality.
Previously, 'Girls Planet 999' limited the contestant pool to those from Korea, Japan, and China. But this time, Mnet will be expanding its contestant pool to all nations across the globe in the hopes of creating a truly global K-Pop boy group.
Meanwhile, 'Boys Planet' is scheduled to air some time in early 2023.
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My guess is that this has to do with a few things.
1 - so many summer comebacks that MNET actually just wants to focus on the comebacks via MCountdown.
2- Then the World Cup which is usually in Summer is between November and December this year. They don’t want to compete with ratings
3 - This will give the eventual winning team time to prepare for their debut and maybe have one comeback before they send them to Kingdom 2 in 2024. They will push back Kingdom 2 until 2024 because the talent pool for Boy Groups is actually very weak right now. They are probably hopeful a new boy group will emerge that hasn’t been on Kingdom previously now that BTS is going on hiatus.
4 - Competing with the pending NCT Hollywood competition show?
Overall I think it’s a smart plan on their end to also ensure they are getting as competitive enough participant pool to make sure they don’t make the same mistakes as they did on Girls Planet. Best move they made was getting rid of the 3 planets. Hopefully we get some real diversity though.