What happens when the top YouTuber in the world, Jimmy Donaldson aka MrBeast, hosts a competition show and is in Emmy consideration for outstanding reality competition series and host? Kids of all ages and adults line up for hours beforehand at the Television Academy’s HQ in North Hollywood, waiting to get into the room for Prime Video’s FYC for “Beast Games.” And almost three hours later, they wait for a meet and greet with one of the biggest celebrities in the world.
Amazon Prime Video via Getty Images
Yes, MrBeast was going to be in the room, along with his co-creators and executive producers Tyler Conklin and Sean Klitzner; editor, creator and co-host Mack Hopkins; casting director Katy Wallin; production designer Stephen Leonhardt; and winner Jeffrey Randall Allen, aka Player 831, to discuss that first season. The show has also been renewed for Seasons 2 and 3 at Amazon’s Prime Video. The conversation was recorded for the Variety Streaming Room presented by Prime Video.
The wildly successful “Beast Games” competition became the streamer’s most-watched unscripted series ever. The series reached 50 million viewers in the 25 days after its Dec. 19 premiere, according to Amazon.
Speaking about the genesis of the show, Donaldson told the audience that after making YouTube videos for over a decade, the creatives behind the video wanted to tell more stories and “had been craving to do something where we told a story over nine or 10 episodes and got to work on a big project.”
After talking with the powers that be at Prime Video, the pieces of the puzzle started to come together. Donaldson said, “What happens if you grab more people than anyone else with a bigger cash prize with bigger sets and just go crazy with it? And it turned out better than I ever thought.”
Conklin revealed that during a phone call with Donaldson, he suggested they have 1,000 contestants, in addition to the $5 million prize money.
The series brought together 1,000 contestants, with a large batch being eliminated with every intense challenge. Among the challenges were potato sack races, a trap door elimination game, and a train elimination game where a team leader had to choose between getting rid of a group of players or vanquishing someone else.
Donaldson wanted it to be an authentic game show, which meant cameras were running 24/7: “So we can actually capture whatever they’re feeling, so we don’t have to go tell them when they can talk or whatever. There’s just cameras always rolling on a thousand different contestants, so you need an A cam and a B cam and wide shots.”
That left Hopkins with 2 million gigabytes of data to sift through and edit. Hopkins, who has edited MrBeast’s videos on YouTube said, “If you wanted to sit down and just watch all the footage in a row from episode one, it would take you two years. I learned a lot of things about myself during this edit. I learned that I can listen to four to five people talk at once, but not six. That sixth person just breaks it.”
Leonhardt discussed his work as a production designer on the show and the challenges he faced. Among them was getting the call that he not only had to design Beast City, which needed to accommodate 500 people, but he also had to design the 1,000-piece trap door set.
In building the house, Leonhardt needed it to function not just to keep the contestants alive, but also to have them move around. “They have to have someplace to go to the bathroom. That’s not easy,” Leonhardt said. He managed to pull it off, except no one accounted for the weather. Two days before the shoot, there was a thunderstorm, which caused the paint treatment to wash off. “We had about 80 painters on lifts repainting the entire thing in the 48 hours before shooting.”
Wallin was on hand to talk about her experience in casting the show and finding the 1,000 contestants in less than 12 weeks.
“We actually spoke to over 100,000 people during the course of casting,” Wallin said, explaining how it became a 24/7 job and needed a strategy. “We had to move 250 minimum people forward a day that we Zoomed with. We were doing virtual Zooms, and that process was just the start of it.”
Allen went on to win a historic $10 million. But he was doing it for more than just the money. His youngest son has a rare brain disease called creatine transporter deficiency. Allen didn’t just want to tell the world about the disease, he wanted to figure out how to find a treatment for himself. He added, “I said, ‘If I can get on, maybe I can tell the world about his rare disease.’ I mean, it’s MrBeast, he’s the number one YouTuber in the world. And I was just crazy enough to think that I could go far enough to tell the story. And then, once I got to Episode 7, I started thinking, ‘I can actually win this thing.’ It’s an absolute miracle that people actually see me on the street and wish well for my son, and ask me about creatine transporter deficiency. I couldn’t have created a better script for a gift to be able to help kids like Lucas, and ultimately, try to find a treatment for him and other kids like him.”
In the winning moment, Allen picked a briefcase with the prize money, and it was a gut instinct that made him choose briefcase number six. In the days leading up to the finale, Allen explained, “The number six kept coming to me in the days before. I was in bunk number six, got key number six, I was in the top six and said a prayer with six words in it. For me, when I saw the briefcases, I saw them numbered, I’m like, it’s number six.”