MrBeast's Team Responds to Accusations of Unsafe Amazon Show Conditions, Blames CrowdStrike Incident
The show titled 'Beast Games,' featuring participants competing for a $5 million prize, began filming its first installment in Las Vegas last month, where several contestants reported unsafe conditions.
MrBeast’s production team addressed "the need for improvement" after claims that the YouTuber’s latest project had contestants competing in dangerous conditions.
In March, 26-year-old MrBeast and Amazon MGM Studios announced the reality competition series Beast Games, where 1,000 contestants compete in extreme challenges for a cash prize of $5 million, besting Netflix’s Squid Game: The Challenge’s $4.56 million prize as the largest single payout in TV history, according to Variety.
According to the New York Times, over a dozen contestants of the first installment of the Beast Games reported numerous issues when it began filming at the Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas last month.
More than 2,000 contestants reportedly ate, slept, and lived at the stadium, and were supposedly told to turn in their belongings, including phones and medications. Their challenges allegedly included moving heavy objects and an extreme version of "capture the flag."
Contestants reported numerous issues to the New York Times, including insufficient access to food, lack of medical care, having to forgo essential medications such as insulin, and enduring unsafe conditions during physically demanding tasks. Some contestants reported experiencing injuries from the physical challenges, with various participants being hospitalized. Other individuals were reportedly seen vomiting and passing out.
"We signed up for the show, but we didn’t sign up for not being fed or watered or treated like human beings," one contestant told the Times.
The newspaper notes that this event was filmed for MrBeast’s YouTube channel to select contestants who would advance to the Amazon MGM show at a later date.
"We were treated horribly," said another contestant. "They took on this challenge of 2,000 competitors. They should have known they needed an enormous crew to handle this correctly."
In a statement sent to the Hollywood Reporter on Friday, a spokesperson for MrBeast wrote, "The MrBeast promotional video shoot, which included over 2,000 participants, was unfortunately complicated by the CrowdStrike incident, extreme weather, and other unexpected logistical and communications issues, which we are currently reviewing, but we are grateful that virtually all of those invited to Toronto for our next production have enthusiastically accepted our invitation."
The statement continued, "We have communicated directly with 97 percent of the 2,000 people who attended to ask for feedback, have launched a formal review of the process, and have taken steps to ensure that we learn from this experience and we are excited to welcome hundreds of men and women to the world’s largest game show in history."
A source connected to the production told the New York Post that some of the claims about the conditions on set are overblown.
"Anyone involved with a production of this size recognizes that something will inevitably go wrong, but there was such a small percentage of people affected and there was personalized calls to over 2000 people to follow up [which] demonstrates how much the Beast Team values every single person," they told the Post.
The anonymous source added that "mistakes" will be addressed in the future, and shared that the show had less than 10 hospitalizations for "sprained ankles and bruised shoulders." The source claimed that nearly 100 percent of the finalists said they are willing return for the actual competition in Toronto, Canada.
