MrBeast's Amazon show accused of unsafe filming conditions by participants

A new New York Times report has accused MrBeast and his partners at Amazon of hosting unsafe conditions while holding a preliminary event for the streamer’s upcoming Amazon reality competition series Beast Games. To participate in the series (which carries a prize of $5 million, and which is the largest and most corporate-backed expansion to date of MrBeast’s whole “dance for my cash, peasants” aesthetic), 2,000 applicants were recently brought to Nevada’s Allegiant stadium for a three-day event. (Meant to winnow down the pack to the 1,000 participants who would actually appear on the show, a production of Amazon MGM.) Several of these participants allege that the production wasn’t set up to handle that large a number of people in a safe fashion, with multiple accusations of producers under-feeding participants, failing to distribute medications in a timely fashion, and otherwise failing to create a safe or hygienic filming environment.

Interestingly, the accusations of unsafe activities don’t simply fall under the kind of thing you might expect from a guy who looked at Squid Game and thought, yep, this sounds like a good time for everyone involved. (Although there was some of that—notably, an event where players divided into teams by grabbing colored shirts, which caused some people to be worried they were going to be trampled in the rush to divide up.) The more substantial complaints, though, come down to the more boring, but extremely important, aspects of shoving 2,000 human beings into a stadium for three days, without allowing them to leave without being disqualified, or bring in outside food, phones, or anything else. To wit: Getting people adequate amounts of food, respecting allergies and dietary restrictions, and even delivering people their pre-brought medications (which had to be handed over to event staff when participants showed up, to be distributed at a later time) in a timely fashion. Among other things, participants—who were denied any kind of time-keeping devices—estimated that they were only fed twice a day, although producers asserted that it was actually three. And some of the meals were apparently as small as a small amount of oatmeal, one hard-boiled egg, and a few raw vegetables. (The fact that hungry participants were sometimes given MrBeast’s Feastables brand of candy bar, and filmed eating and praising the candy, does not diminish the “prototype for a future feudal warlord” stereotypes at play here.)

All told, it just doesn’t sound like the infrastructure was fully in place for an event of this size and physical intensity. (Producers told the Times that some logistics were impacted by the Cloudstrike tech shutdown a few weeks ago, although it’s not entirely clear how that impacted getting everybody fed—or making sure they had timely access to the clean underwear they were required to bring for themselves, also an issue.) Meanwhile, with the “preliminary” event now finished, MrBeast, his producers, and their partners at Amazon have now moved on to the actual show, which will film with its 1,000 participants in Canada in the coming weeks.  “We are grateful that virtually all of those invited to Toronto for our next production have enthusiastically accepted our invitation,” a MrBeast spokesperson wrote.