Jimmy Donaldson has finally created a spectacle.
Now known more commonly as MrBeast, the content creator got his start doing outrageous challenges on YouTube, including a nearly 24-hour-long video of Donaldson counting to 100,000. Other early videos included attempting to break glass using a hundred megaphones, watching paint dry for an hour and staying underwater for 24 hours. Over more than a decade, he’s built an audience of nearly half a billion subscribers, which led him to another new venture: a network competition series.
For the past few years, Donaldson has also hosted Prime Video‘s Beast Games, which features 1,000 players competing for a $10 million cash prize. And that’s just first place. Every season, Donaldson and Beast Games executive producer Michael H. Miller say, they’ve tried to up the ante.
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“In Season 1, we have to figure out every little thing — what people are wearing, how I’m acting, what the sets look like — but the beauty of Season 2 is we get to take what worked in Season 1, and then we just get to figure out: How do we reinvent it? How do we make it bigger, better, or how do we tweak things?” Donaldson said at Deadline’s Contenders TV: Doc + Unscripted panel. “Season 2, from a creative standpoint, was a lot easier, because we’re not having to go from zero to one, we’re going from one to two, in a mental model.”
As the series has progressed, Donaldson adds that he has become more interested in figuring out what makes the show’s contestants tick.
“How do we really get to know these contestants? How do we build up these contestants?” he said. “Zoom in all the way in, where you hear about someone’s kids and you really hear the granularity of their story, and you get to know the contestants. … That was a lot of what I was focused on for Season 2.”
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Miller adds that work on Season 2 required everyone to “raise the bar.”
“It has to be bigger. We have to make it better. We have to deal with all of the financial implications, safety implications, crew implications, everything that goes around that. And it’s a challenge, but we’re all here. We’re all up for it,” he said.
Check back Monday for the panel video.
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