WASHINGTON — MrBeast, the internet celebrity known for his extravagant YouTube videos where people compete in challenges for large sums of money, is planning his biggest project yet: a game show.
Amazon announced Monday that "Beast Games," a reality competition series from the popular YouTuber, will premiere exclusively on Prime Video. MrBeast will be the host and executive producer of the show.
On X, formerly known as Twitter, MrBeast told fans that the Amazon-produced show would break multiple world records.
MrBeast, whose real name is James Donaldson, laid out the details of his new game show in a separate interview on The Colin & Samir Show podcast.
"It's going to be the largest game show in history, the most contestants any game show has ever had, the largest cash prize in history," MrBeast said. "You can imagine what the prize was on Squid Game. It's higher than that."
Squid Game was one of MrBeast's game show-type competitions on YouTube, where he mimicked the games played by characters in the Netflix show of the same name. The winner of that YouTube version won $456,000.
On X, MrBeast added that the new competition would feature over 1,000 contestants with a $5 million prize on the line.
The show is being produced with Amazon Prime, the retail giant's video streaming service, in a deal worth $100 million, MrBeast said.
He explained on the podcast that he had been pitching the game show to various networks and settled on Amazon because of the creative freedom the company's executives promised him.
"Amazon will give us the most creative control, and by most I mean all creative control," he said. "They'll let me do whatever I want, and others didn't."
MrBeast said more details about the show would be coming later in the year. No information was immediately available about when filming would begin or when the show is planned to air.
The YouTube star is one of the internet's most well-known celebrities, with over 245 million subscribers. He has the second-most-subscribed YouTube channel overall and has the highest subscription count of any single individual on the platform.
According to Forbes, he earns approximately $54 million each year and was the highest-paid YouTube star in 2022.
