Look, nobody is going to reasonably claim that either YouTube influencer MrBeast (real name James Donaldson) or best-selling thriller author James Patterson aren’t popular. Donaldson’s MrBeast channel (where he hands out cash to users willing to do outrageous stunts for his amusement) currently boasts a record 515 million subscribers, while Patterson (author of the Alex Cross novels, among many, many others), has sold upwards of 400 million books since 1976.
But the long-awaited(?) literary collaboration between these two seemingly can’t-fail pop culture icons is in danger of, well, failing. At least according to a Monday report from Semafor, which quotes anonymous sources “close to the project” as worrying that the duo’s co-written novel The Most Dangerous Games is heading for disaster.
Calling the meager “four-digit” preorder numbers “a tiny fraction of what the publisher will need to justify Patterson’s and YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson’s [aka MrBeast] hefty fees,” the source conflicts with other unnamed industry interviewees, who claim that the low order numbers are nothing to worry about, as release-day numbers are all that matter.
The plot of The Most Dangerous Games, according to its Harper Collins webpage, involves a hundred people receiving an anonymous email instructing them to brave first the world’s most treacherous environments and then their fellow contestants as they vie for a $1 billion prize. (They may also be saving the world, although details are sketchy.) The site doesn’t make it clear if the mysterious mastermind pulling the strings is in fact MrBeast himself in a bit of metafictional hanky-panky, although the novel’s teaser trailer shows a shady character sealing letters emblazoned with the YouTuber’s logo.
Patterson has long been chided by fellow authors such as Stephen King (who called Patterson “a terrible writer” on national TV) for both the quality of his prose and his practice of putting his name front and center on similar collaborations, where critics allege the now 79-year-old author does little work. As for MrBeast, while it’s not known just how he and his esteemed co-author split the duties on their first-ever collaboration, the combination of an aging author who prefers to farm out his work and a YouTuber who’s never written a book before isn’t the most propitious sign.
As for how The Most Dangerous Games will actually sell (the novel releases today, September 1), that’s up to the throngs of seemingly mismatched Patterson and MrBeast fans.
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