YouTuber MrBeast is all about one-upping himself with bigger and bolder videos.
That approach is at the core of the second season of “Beast Games,” MrBeast’s Amazon Prime Video show that returns to TV screens this week.
“We took everything from season one — all of the learnings from creative to production — we put it all on a wall, and every single day we just set out to make it better, which is the nature of the brand,” Sean Klitzner, one of the show’s co-creators and showrunners, told Business Insider.
The second season will pit 100 “strong” and 100 “smart” contestants against each other in a series of challenges as they vie for over $10 million in prizes.
Business Insider spoke with Klitzner about filming the new season, as well as his experience working at MrBeast’s company, Beast Industries, which he left in October.
Klitzner said a big focus for “Beast Games” season two was meeting the team’s creative goals without blowing through its budget and shooting requirements.
The first season of “Beast Games” was massive, drawing in 50 million viewers in just 25 days, according to Amazon. But it was also a money drain for MrBeast. The YouTuber, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, said making the first season of “Beast Games” lost his company tens of millions of dollars. Beast Industries has been on a broader push to turn its media business profitable in recent months.
For season two, the goal was “balancing the budget and the creative to make sure that we don’t lose the virality,” Klitzner said. “Every day I had the spreadsheets up.”
Klitzner said contingency planning was also a major focus for the show’s second season. The first season encountered a variety of problems, including a crew-member injury, complaints about access to food and medical care during preliminary filming in Las Vegas, and torrential rain while shooting in Toronto.
Klitzner said he worked closely with co-creator Tyler Conklin and the team on brainstorming ideas, and that his role on set and in preproduction was helping to make sure Donaldson and Conklin’s creative vision came to life by anticipating problems before they happened.
He said he would do multiple set walkthroughs to catch details that might draw concern, asking questions like:
“Where’s Jimmy going to park?””How’s he going to get out?””Is he going to get mud on his shoes, and we’re going to have to hold because we have to get him new shoes because he’s our on-camera talent?”
The team also decided to film part of the second season in Greenville, North Carolina, where the MrBeast creative team is based. The company received a $15 million film and entertainment grant from the state to shoot there.
Filming in Greenville “made things much easier, especially when you get to sleep in your own bed,” Klitzner said.
Pulling off “Beast Games,” with its record-breaking scale, involved “over 1,000,000 hours of hard work spread between thousands of people,” Donaldson wrote on X (formerly Twitter). Conklin was the “creative filter” for the show, Klitzner said. Other key contributors included fellow showrunner Matt Apps, co-creator Mack Hopkins, executive producer Mike Miller, and a long list of other creatives.
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Prime Video
Unlike on a traditional Hollywood set, MrBeast staffers are used to wearing many hats, and that expertise translated to the set, Klitzner said.
“Take full ownership of your episode or of your scene or of whatever, by understanding every aspect of it,” Klitzner said. “I want you to know about camera. I want you to know about every aspect of things.”
Klitzner rose through the ranks at MrBeast’s company
Klitzner joined MrBeast in April 2022 after seeing the YouTuber’s post on X that he was looking to hire “a super creative, YouTube nerd.”
After seeing that post and applying, Klitzner said he scored an interview with Conklin, MrBeast’s creative lead, who invited him out to the team’s Greenville headquarters to work for a 90-day test period, known as a vibe check.
Klitzner started at the company as a creative working on MrBeast’s YouTube channel. His first video as lead producer involved a paid assassin chasing after the YouTuber. It was published in March 2023 and has pulled in over 300 million views to date.
The executive worked his way up at Beast Industries, overseeing its YouTube shorts strategy for a few months and helping to produce content for MrBeast’s chocolate brand Feastables. He later served as Donaldson’s chief of staff for about a month, before being brought on to help make “Beast Games.”
After leaving MrBeast, Klitzner said he would love to work with a streamer like Netflix or Amazon that is interested in an unscripted series.
His biggest takeaway from working at MrBeast? Fight through your imposter syndrome, and you’ll discover you’re capable of pulling off a lot.
The opportunities Klitzner had to “showcase what I could do have changed my life,” he said. “I don’t feel like an imposter anymore.”
