His version of the South Korean series Squid Game is guaranteed to be hemoglobin-free but causes a lot of ink to flow. From December 19, Mr Beast, the most followed YouTuber in the world (337 million subscribers on his main channel) will host the “Beast Games” on the video-on-demand platform Prime Video, a reality TV show in in which 1,000 competitors will compete to win a jackpot of 5 million dollars (4.8 million euros).
The celebrations have not started and the show is already controversial. In mid-September, five participants filed a complaint in a Los Angeles court against the production company of MrBeast, 26 years old, but also against Amazon, for “mistreatment” during filming. James “Jimmy” Donaldson, his real name, is nevertheless a seasoned YouTuber who, since the age of 13, has multiplied games and challenges, first with videos around gaming : “Beat Ronaldo and win $1 million” (with the presence of the football icon), “1-100 year olds fight for $500,000” and, already, a first video inspired by the South Korean series, « Squid Game in real life for $456,000 »… Ignoring his anti-capitalist statement (proletarians play a game of massacre to entertain plutocrats), he was already riding on his success by publishing then “the most amazing video ever[il ait] never made ». This production, more expensive than a Netflix episode ($3.5 million), has accumulated more than 677 million views.
Meteorological rise
The viewing figures for the Wichita (Kansas) native’s videos and the earnings they promise are dizzying. Sensationalism, however, inhabited him from the beginning. Younger, the one who considered, according to his mother (quoted by Anita Elberse and Oliver Band, in a case study focused on the influencer), of to become a baseball player, decided to devote himself to his activity as a videographer when he learned, at the age of 16, that he had Crohn’s disease. From then on, his life revolved around YouTube, and, later, his business. We say it ” obsessed “ by the way the platform’s algorithm works, which it intends to uncover. “I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied cinema, I went to bed: that was my life,” confided Jimmy Donaldson, interviewed by Bloomberg, in 2020.
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