Amazon's ramping things up ahead of the eventual release of Beast Games, the collaboration it's been trailing with YouTube giant MrBeast over the last year and more. The show drops on 19 December, so it's now just days away, and a full trailer has finally showed what sort of challenges it'll bring with it.
Beast Games will see a massive 1,000 competitors duke it out in one of the biggest reality TV game shows ever, all of them fighting for a $5 million prize that only one can take home (we assume). Quite frankly, this trailer makes it even more obvious than the previous teaser that it might be too stressful for most of us.
After all, it's one thing climbing up the ladder of trivia on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? or making guesses in The Price is Right – but Beast Games looks altogether more involved and long-term. Contestants aren't just there for one day of fun in a studio, either.
It looks like we'll see them play in games like a giant session of hide and seek on an empty island, against seekers who just happen to be ex-Navy Seals. Another moment sees contestants taking on physical tests, including seeing who can hang from a bar the longest.
Now, those both sound challenging, but it's another of the moments we glimpse that I would most want to avoid. There's a quick sequence of shots where we see contestants in what look like padded cells, including one holding up a sign that reads: "I'm going crazy". That suggests some sort of endurance challenge with nothing to do, which is fairly typical for MrBeast's YouTube output.
Whether that's one of the challenges that got him in hot water with ex-contestants might come out in time, too. The show, before it's even aired, has been dogged by accusations from those who took part in it. Some of these people allege that they were mistreated, disrespected and even sexually harassed on-set, all of which MrBeast has so far denied.
That all means that this will be one of the noisiest reality show launches for a while, since controversy normally becomes attached to these shows after they stream, not before. It also confirms that you'd have to pay me much more than $5 million to subject myself to the scrutiny involved. Whether Beast Games can help Amazon Prime Video to climb into position as the best streaming service remains anyone's guess, though.
