YouTube’s biggest content creator MrBeast announced on Monday that he is filming a game show for Amazon’s Prime Video.
On X, he wrote: “Big News Gamers I’m going to make the biggest game show in history and release it on Prime Video! Over 1,000 contestants, $5,000,000 in prize money and many other world records.”
Deadline mentioned earlier that this deal was in the works, but regardless, the news comes as no surprise. It’s the natural next step for the 25-year-old online phenomenon. It already produces YouTube videos that have a budget comparable to that of actual TV shows — so why shouldn’t Hollywood?
Prime Video has tapped big name creators to develop new shows in the past. Amazon Studios has taken Critical Role, a popular series of real-life Dungeons & Dragons games, and turned it into an animated series.
“It’s going to be the biggest game show in history, with the most contestants a game show has ever had, with the biggest prize money in history,” MrBeast said in a interview with YouTubers Colin and Samir. “It’s like our regular videos, but just 20 times better […] I have a bigger budget. Money is not a limitation.”
It’s hard to imagine that money was initially a constraint for MrBeast. Before Netflix turned ‘Squid Game’ into a reality show, MrBeast did the same thing, building elaborate sets and awarding $456,000 in prize money. On his channel, which has 245 million subscribers, he regularly awards hundreds of thousands of dollars to contestants who complete absurd tasks like living in a grocery store for weeks or competing in an Olympics-style showdown with a person from (almost) every country.
It’s not always a safe bet to take online creators from the laptop screen to the big screen. Older YouTube sensations learned this the hard way (I’ve tried and failed to forget “Fred: The Movie” and “Annoying Orange: Movie Fruitacular” exists). But MrBeast isn’t just another YouTuber.
MrBeast occupies a strange space in which he is perhaps one of the most influential figures among teenage children – his dominance of culture is so great that I think of it as the ‘MrBeast industrial complex’. However, most people over the age of thirty probably don’t know who he is. But if all goes well with “Beast Games,” this kid from North Carolina will somehow become even more ubiquitous than he already is.
