Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson is teaming up with Amazon MGM Studios to create a fully-fledged reality TV show of his own: Beast Games. The game show competition will pit “over 1,000” contestants against each other in a chance to win a $5 million cash prize, a release said. Beast Games does not have a release window yet, but it will debut worldwide exclusively to Amazon’s Prime Video service.
Donaldson is set to be the host and will serve as an executive producer on the show. We don’t have many other details on the competition, but a release that said it would be based on his YouTube show.
“My goal is to make the greatest show possible and prove YouTubers and creators can succeed on other platforms,” Donaldson said in a release. “Amazon gave me the creative control I need to try and make it happen. I hope to make the YouTube community proud.”
Donaldson has cultivated a massive YouTube audience via sharing over-the-top, stunt content. At time of publication, his YouTube channel has over 245 million subscribers. True to the nature of his previous content, this show appears to one-up more than a few prior projects. The show will be “biggest reality competition series ever” with the “biggest single prize in the history of television and streaming,” a description of the show said.
The announcement is the next turn in a series of events that seemingly started with Netflix’s viral hit, Squid Games. Following the release of the show in 2021, Donaldson published a video that turned the fictional battle royale scenario into a real-life reality series. The video, titled “$456,000 Squid Game In Real Life!”, later became his most-viewed video ever. At the time of this writing it has well more than half a billion views. Roughly two years later, Netflix created a reality show of its own inspired by Squid Games, but released it to little fanfare.
Donaldson was not involved with the creation of the Netflix’s reality show, but in a post on X he said he “probably could have helped them immensely” with it. Time will tell if he can actually live up to that statement with Beast Games.