SEBASTIAN — Our very own Nichole Johanson, the Director of Mel Fisher’s Treasures Museum, will be competing on MrBeast’s ‘Beast Games’ Season 2, which Pits Brains Against Brawn.
“I’ve had a little secret….I had the honor of being chosen to compete on Beast Games Season 2-Strong & Smart. Tune in on Amazon Prime on January 7th,” Johanson said.
The first three episodes will drop on Amazon Prime on January 7, 2025. New installments will roll out weekly, building to a finale on Feb. 25. At stake: a $5 million grand prize, plus an additional $15 million in cash and giveaways scattered throughout the competition.
YouTube powerhouse Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, is cranking up the chaos for the second season of his reality juggernaut “Beast Games,” debuting a “Strong vs. Smart” showdown that promises to blend sweat-soaked endurance tests with mind-bending strategy puzzles.
The Prime Video series shattered records in its first outing, titled Beast Games, drawing 50 million global viewers in just 25 days. The first three episodes are dropping at once on January 7th, and new installments will roll out weekly, building to a finale on Feb. 25. At stake: a $5 million grand prize, plus an additional $15 million in cash and giveaways scattered throughout the competition.
This time around, 200 contestants — half billed as the world’s fittest physical specimens, the other half as elite problem-solvers with sky-high IQs — will clash inside a sprawling, custom-built metropolis dubbed Beast City. The set, which sprawls across sections dedicated to everything from obstacle courses to elaborate escape rooms, has already snagged a Guinness World Record for the largest single build in competitive reality TV history.
“We literally built a massive city for ‘Beast Games’ season 2,” Donaldson posted on X last month, teasing the scale. “100 of the strongest and 100 of the smartest people on Earth compete for over $10 million in prizes in the most insane games ever created.”
The “Strong vs. Smart” format marks a sharp pivot from season one’s free-for-all frenzy with 1,000 players. Now, alliances will fracture along team lines, forcing burly athletes to outwit chess grandmasters and cerebral tacticians to haul massive loads under time pressure. Challenges, producers say, are engineered to alternate between raw power feats — think endurance marathons and heavy-lift relays — and cerebral gauntlets like cryptographic riddles and high-stakes negotiations.
Donaldson, 27, hosts and executive produces alongside a crew of familiar faces from his YouTube empire: co-hosts Karl Jacobs, Nolan Hansen, Chandler Hallow, and Tareq Salameh, plus warm-up host Sean Klitzner. Showrunners Tyler Conklin and Mack Hopkins, who helped craft the original, return to direct the action. Filming wrapped in August, with behind-the-scenes glimpses already hinting at returning fan favorites like season one’s $10 million winner, Jeffrey Allen, and standouts Emma Nelson and Gage Gallagher.
The series streams exclusively on Prime Video in more than 240 countries, cementing its status as a global spectacle. Season 3 is already greenlit, signaling Donaldson’s bet on the format’s staying power.