Beast Games
I have watched with somewhat morbid fascination about how a show that has been utterly trashed online has…ignored all of that discourse and is now one the most popular series in the country.
That would be Beast Games, the Amazon Prime Video reality competition series starring Mr. Beast, global YouTube star, giving away five million dollars in prizes after the field of 1,000 players is slimmed down to one. The Squid Game-ish series (minus, you know, death) has cut contestants quickly, and it’s now on episode 7 out of 10, airing a new one each week.
Despite the online discourse, Beast Games is routinely the #1 show on Amazon Prime Video whenever a new episode airs, or even for some time after, as currently it’s #1 as I write this, three days after the new episode went up.
Top 10
The limited amount of critics that have watched the series hate it, as it stands at a dismal 13% on Rotten Tomatoes. But that’s in enormously dramatic contrast with the user score sitting at 90% with over a thousand reviews in before the show has even ended.
Mr. Beast continues to dominate YouTube with his 350 million subscriber base and every new video he releases gets at least 100 million views over time, if not 200-300 million. If even a fraction of those viewers head over to Amazon Prime Video to watch his reality series, it’s no wonder that it’s doing so well. For reference, the top show on Netflix last week, which has a larger subscriber base and almost always more viewership, was American Primeval which had 14.3 million views. We don’t have exact figures for Beast Games, but if its even a fraction of his YouTube audience, it should be up there, and it’s no wonder it’s planted on Amazon’s Top 10 list, usually at #1, every week.
There is nothing confirmed about a second season of Beast Games, but there’s just no reason to think it wouldn’t happen with this level of performance. A $5 million prize and millions in production value aren’t cheap, but Amazon is also a network that is comfortable spending $1 billion on five seasons of Rings of Power, a show which I doubt performed this well.
Mr. Beast’s unpopularity in many social media circles has become widespread, but it simply does not translate to the wider reality of how he and his content are received by his hundreds of millions of fans. And look no further than to see how that’s also translating into other forms of streaming media than Beast Games.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
