McDonald's Grinch Happy Meals May or May Not Make it to the United States

McDonald's is getting ready for the holiday season, and this year, the fast food chain is adding an entire new meal. This Happy Meal features the Grinch's face, and also includes a Grinch plushie inside. Since the meal was introduced, it's begun to go viral on social media.

As more and more people learn about these new Happy Meals, many are wondering what they'll need to do to get their hands on one. At the moment, the meals are only available in the United Kingdom, and everyone who has learned about them in the United States wants to know if they'll eventually come stateside. Here's what we know about whether the U.S. will get them.

Currently, the Grinch Happy Meals are only available in the U.K., and even there you can only get one through Dec. 31. Given how much attention it's garnered on social media, though, some are wondering whether the meals will expand to new markets, and specifically to the United States.

We don't have any word on that yet, and it seems, at least for the moment, like this was planned as a U.K. specific rollout.

Now that there has been tons of chatter about the Happy Meals online, though, some suspect that McDonald's will do everything it can to capitalize on their success and expand the meals to as many markets as possible. Whether they have the infrastructure in place to make that happen remains to be seen, but there are certainly plenty of people across social media who would like to get ahold of these meals themselves.

"Hey @McDonalds are you selling the grinch happy meals in the United States I keep hearing rumors and I hope it’s true?!" one person wrote on Twitter.

"Please don’t say anything to me if you see me at McDonald’s getting 2 Grinch happy meals. Yes one is for my daughter and the other one is for me…" another person added.

The demand is clearly there, so it might make sense for McDonald's to meet it.

This is far from the first time that McDonald's has taken advantage of specific menu items that are only available for a limited time. The McRib is always popular when it shows up on the menu for exactly this reason, and the Shamrock Shake is also incredibly popular when it shows up every March.

The brilliance of the Grinch Happy Meals, though, is that the food stays exactly the same.

All that changes is the packaging and the toy that the meal comes with. While making that packaging and more of those ties quickly could prove difficult, but it might be a great way for the company to take advantage of a viral social media moment. After all, it's not every day that a fast food chain like McDonald's has something that people are genuinely interested in tracking down.