The Shady Side Of MrBeast's Beast Games

MrBeast is a world-renowned YouTuber, philanthropist, and, as of now, one of the richest game show hosts of all time. Born James Stephen Donaldson, MrBeast built his massive YouTube following by giving away millions of dollars on camera and by creating some truly outrageous competitions on his channel — like the time he made "Squid Game" happen in real life. Now he's partnered with Amazon Prime Video to create "Beast Games," a reality show where 1,000 people compete in a series of challenges for a $5 million grand prize.

MrBeast is no stranger to famous collaborations — he once got Hans Zimmer to compose a score for one of his YouTube videos – but this time around he may have bitten off more than he can chew. Creating "Beast Games" involved two massive shoots in Las Vegas and Toronto, and there have been some concerning stories coming out of both productions. Contestants say they faced uncomfortable and outright dangerous conditions while participating in the show, and even the "Beast Games" crew has some complaints to share. Whether or not "Beast Games" goes down in history as one of the best reality TV shows of all time, it'll likely be remembered for being one of the most controversial. Here's how the shady side of "Beast Games" has landed its creator in hot water.

It's only natural for a production as large as "Beast Games" to bring a ton of legal baggage along with it. The show needs to make sure contestants consent to what they're about to film, and it needs to make sure that everyone agrees not to spoil the ending before it airs. Even with those caveats in mind, some people who helped make "Beast Games" were a little uncomfortable with the agreements they had to sign.

The contestants had to sign documents before they were allowed to actually compete in the games, and were willing to sign away quite a few rights for the chance at winning $5 million. According to The New York Times, every contestant signed a contract that included the line, "I understand that such activities may cause me death, illness, or serious bodily injury, including, but not limited to exhaustion, dehydration, overexertion, burns, and heat stroke." Of course, like any reality competition, "Beast Games" is just protecting itself from liability, but it's still a little jarring to see the risk of death spelled out in a contract about a YouTuber's game show.

Contestants also agreed to forfeit all winnings and pay a $500,000 fine if they spoiled the ending of the show. The crew's non-disclosure agreements, however, were even more intense. Their NDAs stipulated that crew members couldn't speak publicly about the production for three years, and they had to waive their rights to seek legal recourse against the show or its producers for any reason.

One thing that sets "Beast Games" apart from many other television productions is that the show uses a non-union crew. YouTuber Rosanna Pansino reported the news in a video, where she shared messages that she had received from people who'd worked on "Beast Games" in Las Vegas and Toronto. Pansino explained in the video that she'd heard from a trusted source in the industry, "Jimmy and his team specifically requested that 'Beast Games' be non-union." According to Pansino's source, MrBeast wanted to avoid paying benefits and the stringent safety regulations that would have come with using a union crew.

That account lines up with what Rolling Stone heard from "Beast Games" crew members in Toronto. The Toronto shoot also used a fully non-union crew, but the crew didn't exactly appreciate that approach. "The union world has been hit hard and hasn't recovered, so they had every opportunity to get talented pros for all aspects, but they didn't want to pay," one crew member said. Rolling Stone also found several casting calls and ads for "Beast Games" that specified the show was looking for non-union workers only.

Despite all the legal agreements they had to sign ahead of participating in "Beast Games," many contestants still felt like the production wasn't honest with them about the initial stage of the competition. The Prime Video show sports the tagline, "1,000 players. 5 million dollars. 1 winner." That's what many who signed up for the first part of the show expected, but some of those competitors say they felt like the rug was pulled out from them when the games actually began.

The first step of creating "Beast Games" involved a massive competition in Las Vegas that included 2,000 competitors. The show's plan was to narrow that initial group of people down to just 1,000 final contestants who would film "Beast Games" in Toronto, but the people who showed up to the Las Vegas competition didn't realize their chances of winning were half of what they'd expected them to be. Of course, there was never any guarantee that competing in the show would lead to a payout. Many competitors were simply hoping for the chance to be on TV or make an appearance on MrBeast's YouTube channel, but even those hopes ended up being dashed pretty quickly.

The people competing in "Beast Games" are vying for the chance to win $5 million, but many who signed up for the show were hoping that it would come with some other benefits. They weren't just looking for the big prize or the fun of the experience as a whole. They were hoping that they'd get to network, potentially meet MrBeast himself, and, more than anything, appear on TV.

Many of the people who were simply hoping to have their moment in the spotlight walked away from "Beast Games" disappointed. Actor Scott Leopold became one of those people after taking part in the Las Vegas "Beast Games" shoot, telling Rolling Stone that he was shocked by the terrible conditions the competitors had to deal with while working on the show. But he was even more upset when he realized that he might have taken part in the competition for no reason whatsoever. 

"We don't even know to what extent it's going to be used on his YouTube channel. At that point, we didn't even know if we were getting paid. Why am I doing it?" Leopold said. He and others felt like the people producing "Beast Games" hadn't been upfront about what competitors on the show could expect or just how little screen time they might get in the final product.

The real problems with "Beast Games" began when the show started filming in Las Vegas. The initial shoot included over 2,000 competitors, and it wasn't long after people started showing up that everyone realized how unprepared the "Beast Games" team really was. Madison Malone Kircher, a reporter for The New York Times, told Slate, "It seems as though MrBeast and his production team were just not equipped for the sheer volume of people they would need to feed and move and manage."

The sheer chaos of getting 2,000 people checked into hotels, organized into groups for competitions, and prepared to spend multiple days performing elaborate challenges was intense. MrBeast is no stranger to elaborate video shoots, but nothing on his YouTube channel matches the scale of "Beast Games," particularly that initial shoot in Las Vegas. What made everything even more complicated is that competitors weren't allowed to bring any personal items with them. 

"Beast Games" went to great lengths to avoid having a major game show cheating scandal in the mix, so contestants had to hand over clothes, medicine, and anything else they needed to the show's staff. Figuring out how to get those items back, or what they were supposed to do next for the show, proved to be difficult. "I spoke to some people who said, 'The production staff I talked to were so kind, but they had no information,'" Kircher said.

If you've ever watched any of the giant competitions that MrBeast has created for his YouTube channel, then you know that they can be pretty over-the-top and get out of hand pretty quickly. Contestants have been injured on game shows before, but by trying to capture the chaotic magic of MrBeast's YouTube channel, "Beast Games" may have made things a bit too risky for its competitors. 

During the Las Vegas shoot for "Beast Games," a ton of competitors were injured, and many of them even had to be rushed to the hospital. Vital Vegas spoke with a local hospital employee who said, "I'm aware of three or four hospital evacs today. Overnight shift said it was insane, so not sure if or how many hospital evacs there were ... The bare bones medic staff on site is not adequate and were overwhelmed last night."

YouTuber Rosanna Pansino also heard some concerning stories coming out of the Las Vegas shoot. In a July 26 video, Pansino shared some messages that she claimed were from "Beast Games" contestants, who told her that they witnessed multiple people being removed from the competition after breaking bones during the challenges. The contestants who reached out to Pansino claimed that the "Beast Games" team were well aware of the safety concerns but did nothing to mitigate the chances that people would be injured while playing.

A flurry of injuries wasn't the only concerning news coming out of the "Beast Games" Las Vegas shoot. As noted earlier, the rules of the competition required contestants to turn over all their personal belongings, including daily medication, to the "Beast Games" crew, and many of them said they struggled to get those items back. One contestant told Vital Vegas, "Contestants were instructed to provide producers with five days worth of medications, and as of today, contestants have not received a single dose. They have denied food to diabetics, denied water to contestants, and at least two individuals have had seizures as a result."

The contestants who reached out to Rosanna Pansino also backed up that account. In one message, a contestant told her, "It was really bad! People were having seizures because they were not getting medication, even though we were promised we would." Unfortunately, the health concerns went even further than that. "And five of us so far have tested positive for Covid," a contestant wrote to Pansino. "Also someone was allowed to go in with pink eye." As contestants spent hours sitting around, waiting for the crew to bring them a drink, a snack, or their meds, more than a few of them probably wondered if the chance to win $5 million was worth all the hassle.

"Beast Games" is supposed to be an epic competition, but the premise of the show only works if all the contestants are on equal footing. A wide range of competitors, from young adults all the way up to octogenarians, showed up for the games, but the people who participated in the Las Vegas shoot felt that the challenges were set up to greatly benefit young, athletic men. The first challenge of the game was a tug-of-war involving 400 people and 10,000-pound weights, and as the contestants started breaking up into teams, many of them noticed that the most athletic participants immediately tried to band together.

Many contestants felt that the challenges were biased from the start, and they said that the attitude of the people running the games didn't help in the slightest. "To make things worse," one contestant wrote in a message to Rosanna Pansino, "Men started realizing they could take out the women without being eliminated. Guys started tackling and hitting women. Two girls were tackled and passed out on the field and dragged off to continue filming."

That bias seemingly carried over into other aspects of the production. One woman told The New York Times that she was part of a group of menstruating women who were laughed at by the show's staff when they repeatedly tried to get their underwear back after being forced to turn it in. They and many others felt the Las Vegas shoot set them up for failure.

Some of the issues that plagued "Beast Games" in Las Vegas were resolved by the time the show began filming in Toronto. The Toronto shoot had half as many competitors as the one in Las Vegas, so the organization of the entire production was much better. Competitors reported that the conditions had improved, and many of them felt that the bias of the earlier games had been solved by the challenges in Toronto.

Unfortunately, even more problems were unfolding behind the scenes in Toronto. Crew members said they faced conditions that would have made more sense on one of the more chaotic seasons of "Survivor" rather than an Amazon-backed show filming indoors. They said that they were frequently denied meals or offered only small amounts of food when craft services ran low, even while the production expected them to work 16-hour days. 

Many crew members also had serious safety concerns, particular when a massive rainstorm flooded part of the set. Production stopped for a day and a half, but some crew members reported that they were told to keep working alongside electrical equipment that was dangerously close to the water.

From providing sketchy working conditions to specifically seeking out non-union employees, "Beast Games" fully embraced its shady side when looking for a production crew. Despite that, the people who had the opportunity to work on such a massive show probably could have forgiven more of the production's faults if they'd been paid correctly, consistently, and on time. According to some of the crew members who worked on the show in Toronto, that wasn't the case at all.

At least four crew members said that they encountered serious issues while trying to get their pay from "Beast Games." One production assistant claimed they went three weeks without receiving a paycheck, and another said they hadn't been paid at all by the time the production wrapped. Those crew members might not have been outliers either, because the "Beast Games" team sent out an email to the crew informing them that a hotline was being set up to help them deal with various payroll issues. The paycheck problem could likely be another result of having such a massive, disorganized production, but even genuine mistakes look extra shady given the rest of the circumstances surrounding "Beast Games."

As more and more news about the chaos on the show has come out, MrBeast's team has responded to the allegations against "Beast Games." Shortly after the Las Vegas shoot, the team gave a statement to The Hollywood Reporter clarifying some of what went wrong. MrBeast's team pointed to bad weather and the CrowdStrike IT outage as some of the reasons for the rampant disorganization, but added, "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."

MrBeast responded directly to some of the concerns that contestants and people online have had about "Beast Games" in an interview with Oompaville on YouTube. MrBeast acknowledged that mistakes were made during the production, and he pointed to a lack of properly stocked feminine hygiene products as a problem that taught him an important lesson. On the other hand, he said, "I think in general, a lot of it has just been blown out of proportion." MrBeast went on to claim that the show had used union workers, despite the claims of the crew, and he insisted that no one had broken a bone or been seriously injured while filming the show.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone online was willing to take MrBeast's claims at face value. Some "Beast Games" competitors also don't buy his explanations. Five "Beast Games" competitors sued the show after taking part in it, arguing that they faced general mistreatment, dangerous filming conditions, and even sexual harassment from some of the show's staff.