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MrBeast Launches Million-Dollar Challenge With His New James Patterson Book
Read me, please // Illustration by Kate Walker
MrBeast’s new book, released yesterday, is the gateway to a challenge with a $1 million cash prize.
The Big Picture: The experience economy is slowly transforming into the challenge economy — one where active participation becomes crucial to fully enjoying a piece of art or event. MrBeast’s entire ecosystem is based on that idea, so bringing it to his first-ever book seems like a no-brainer in hindsight.
Between The Pages: The Most Dangerous Games, which MrBeast co-wrote with bestselling author James Patterson, is a bit of a game in itself.
Context: MrBeast (a fictionalized version, at least) is one of the book’s main characters, hosting a death-defying challenge with a billion dollars on the line.
Content: The book contains clues and Easter eggs to help people navigate a real-life series of weekly challenges.
Conflict: The pool of contenders will eventually whittle down to 10 finalists who will “come together for a final ‘face the Beast’ round,” per Tubefilter. The champion wins the $1 million prize.
Last Chapter: It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there’s a cynical reason why MrBeast included the challenge in his book — it needs all the help it can get to sell. According to data from Semafor, preorders were only in the four figures. That’s pretty dismal for a book from Patterson and the biggest creator there is (approximately 6% of the world’s population follows MrBeast).
The opportunity to win $1 million for closely reading the book is sure to get a sizable fraction of the creator’s 515 million subscribers to make a purchase — it’s currently #1,878 in new releases across all genres on Amazon.
Hey, according to MrBeast himself, The Most Dangerous Games “might be the first book they actually read.” The jury’s out on whether that’s the vote of confidence he intended it to be.
Prediction: Prepare for The Most Dangerous Games breakdown videos to take over your feed — a bit like a digital search for Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.