MrBeast’s Olympics video tells us one important thing about the future of entertainment

The YouTube superstar has once again broken the internet with his latest video, says Ryan Coogan – but what does it tell us about Gen Z’s viewing habits?

The future of entertainment is bleak, not because what’s being produced by guys like MrBeast is necessarily bad, but because it’s so ephemeral (Getty Images)

Every generation thinks the one immediately below them is wrong about everything. Their music, the way they dress, and the way they entertain themselves – it’s all wrong. Culture peaked when I was 18 years old, and it’s been all downhill since then.

You’d think being aware of those biases would make you less susceptible to them – that, as a millennial, I’d be much more forgiving of Gen Z and understand that even though I don’t necessarily like the things they like, it doesn’t make those things any worse than the stuff I enjoyed when I was younger.

Then I’ll see the kinds of things they’ve been watching and I’m right back there with the rest of the old people: the kids aren’t alright. We’ve failed the youth.

If you haven’t heard, YouTuber MrBeast released his latest video yesterday evening, in which he gathered one person from every country in the world to compete in a series of challenges that he touts as being “the most extreme version of the Olympics ever created”, but really have more of an American Ninja Warrior vibe to them. The winner of the games receives an enormous custom gold medal that MrBeast claims is worth $250,000, and which looks like the kind of MacGuffin you’d see Doctor Doom and Spider-Man fighting over in Avengers 9.

Call me a bleeding heart SJW if you want, but something doesn’t sit right with me about getting random people from every country on Earth to compete to “see which country is the best”. I guess in theory it’s no different to something like the Olympics or the World Cup (my commiserations to the Lionesses), but those events tend not to refer to the competitors exclusively by the country they hail from instead of by their government name, which makes it feel sort of dehumanising.

Kudos to MrBeast for not leaning too hard into international tensions. He doesn’t have the contestants from Ukraine and Russia have an arm-wrestling contest or anything like that, but there is a moment where several contestants talk about how they’ll be voting to make one challenge more difficult for Israel because “my country doesn’t like Israel lowkey”, which feels very off.

It also doesn’t help that the whole video is kind of… sloppy?

Look, I’m not going to say that the video is necessarily bad, but for a potentially record-breaking piece of media that’s going to be watched by the population of a G8 country, I’d expect it to be slightly more polished. Don’t get me wrong, MrBeast did not cheap out on this content. You can see the money. Archaeologists are going to find that medal in 2,000 years and be afraid to move it from its resting place for fear of unleashing a terrible curse.

But it’s so rushed. Nothing is given any chance to breathe before we’re quickly moved on to the next thing. We don’t really get to know any of the contestants (like I said, they’re only ever referred to by the name of the country they hail from), and people are eliminated so quickly that there’s no time for any reflection.

It’s like they compressed an entire season of reality television into a 19-minute video. When one of the contestants gets eliminated in the final challenge, he says “this was the best five days of my life”. Five days? Up until that point, I thought they’d filmed this in an afternoon. A television network would have gotten months of content out of this premise, but here it’s been whittled down to something you can take in over a bowl of cereal.

The future of entertainment is bleak, not because what’s being produced by guys like MrBeast is necessarily bad, but because it’s so ephemeral. Artistry and effort are replaced by spectacle – it turns out you don’t need to refine your craft when you can just parade around a huge gold medal and then cut to a contextless shot of a person screaming. I don’t want to sound like an old media bore, but everything is structured like a TikTok, where the goal is to deliver content as fast and as hard as possible to compensate for the dwindling attention spans of your audience.

MrBeast seems like a nice enough guy. He announces at the end of the video that every contestant will receive $2,000 just for showing up, and he doesn’t humiliate anybody or put them in danger. A lot of his other work is philanthropic – his video where he pays to restore the sight of hundreds of legally blind people is an objective net good.

But as an entertainer, he’s a disaster. His content is shallow and weak, and the fact that it’s so popular is the most damning indictment of Gen Z to date.

But then what do I know? My generation used to post Death Cab For Cutie songs on their Myspace pages and get Harry Potter wrist tattoos. Maybe they’ll grow out of it.