YouTuber MrBeast is partnering with Amazon’s MGM Studios for new series

Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast on the internet, on Monday announced a new reality competition show in collaboration with Amazon MGM Studios, aiming to further blur the lines between YouTube and traditional television.

The new series, “Beast Games,” has been billed as “the biggest reality competition series ever” and will feature 1,000 contestants competing for $5 million in prize money.

Donaldson is the most followed individual creator on YouTube, with more than 389 million subscribers across all his channels, and is the fourth most followed creator on TikTok. His large-scale productions on YouTube have been compared to those of a professional television operation, with an extensive crew, highly developed sets and big prize money. Donaldson’s past videos range from trapping isolation for seven daystrying to destroy a Lamborghini with a train and running his own version of the Squid Game.

Donaldson said in an interview on the Colin and Samir Show podcast that his YouTube videos can fetch between $4 and $5 million each, and the new show will have an even bigger budget. Puck News Release appreciated the deal between Donaldson and Amazon will be about $100 million.

“It’s like our normal videos, only 20 times better,” Donaldson said on the podcast. “Money is not a constraint on the show. So I get to do anything too, which is like so much more liberating than you would think and so mind-blowing.”

Donaldson said working with a streaming service allowed him to break free from the algorithms and values ​​that perform better on YouTube, such as thumbnails, video length and title. However, MrBeast’s videos can generate between 300 million and 500 million views each, and there are only 80 million active Amazon Prime Video households in the US, on Amazon.

Beast Games isn’t the first time a creator has made content for a streaming service, and the news is part of a trend for creators to expand their content beyond social media platforms to diversify revenue. The YouTube group “Sidemen” released a documentary on Netflix earlier this year, for example, and the family of TikToker Charli D’Amelio just aired the third season of their reality show on Hulu.

“We’re reinventing everything,” Donaldson said on the podcast. “It will probably be more than six hours of content, where my normal videos are 20 minutes long. The character building, the storytelling will be out of this world compared to our normal videos.”