MrBeast, otherwise known as Jimmy Donaldson, gave away $25 million in prize money on his Prime Video competition series Beast Games, including a $10M prize to the winner Jeffrey Randall Allen.
He could be set to hand out even more as he teased that “another 10 seasons could happen.”
The show saw 1,000 contestants compete in a series of physical, mental and social challenges to win a grand prize, which initially was set as $5M. It premiered on Amazon’s streaming service in December and ran through February.
The streamer is casting for Season 2, though it hasn’t been officially handed a renewal; there’s talk of a two-season order. Donaldson was coy when asked about the return during a panel for Deadline’s Contenders Television: Documentary, Unscripted & Variety event.
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“[Sean] Klitzner is kind of my boss in this regard, and he told me I wasn’t allowed to speak about that subject during this interview,” he said.
Fellow panelist Klitzner, one of the show’s co-creators and executive producers, also swerved the question but added there’s an “unlimited amount of good ideas.” “If there’s a good idea in front of us, and there’s a YouTube video that needs it, we’re going to film it for the YouTube video,” he said. “Another good idea is right around the corner.”
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Donaldson agrees. “I’m on Year 5 of people telling me, ‘Aren’t you going to run out of ideas? Your YouTube channel is eventually going to get stale.’ But if you’re constantly innovating, adapting and actually trying to push the boundaries, there are plenty of ways you can [do it],” he added.
But why did a man with more than 380M subscribers on YouTube – making him the world’s biggest creator on that platform – and more than 115M followers on TikTok want to move into more traditional television?
RELATED: Contenders TV Documentary, Unscripted & Variety — Deadline’s Complete Coverage
“Truthfully, when you make videos on YouTube, they’re usually not episodic,” he said. “You usually just do one YouTube video. If I put 100 people in a circle and say, ‘Last one to leave the circle wins a million dollars,’ that’s a single 40-minute video. In that one video you have to build the characters and set the stage. By the time you start building the characters, it’s already winding down, and then the video ends. It’s very hard to get a lot of depth in a single YouTube video. I’ve just always been really excited about taking the big spectacles we do on YouTube but being able to do it over an episodic series where we could actually get to know the contestants and have more depth and story and get more invested into the challenges and games. The idea was to take what we do on YouTube, but make it 10 times bigger and 20 times better.”
Allen, otherwise known as Player 831, won the big prize in a chaotic finale. His son Lucas has creatine transporter deficiency (CTD), and Allen is putting that prize money toward helping him and others with that disease.
“Quantitatively, it costs like, $50 million to try to cure a rare disease, and so $10 million is going to be a huge jump-start,” Allen said. “The qualitative side is so much awareness … stuff you can’t measure with dollars and cents and those could be even more powerful than the prize, which is awesome, but it’s my job to continue to carry the torch and spread the awareness and ultimately, try to find a treatment for these kiddos.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
The post MrBeast Teases 10 More Seasons Of Prime Video’s ‘Beast Games’ – Contenders TV: Documentary, Unscripted & Variety appeared first on Deadline.
