Dark Horse Stages' newest soundstages didn’t stay empty for long after opening for business in November. Days after the two, 20,000-square-foot stages debuted, YouTube juggernaut MrBeast set up shop to film, Dark Horse CEO Kirk Englebright said Friday.

The Wilmington production facility announced Friday that Greenville’s Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast who runs the most-subscribed YouTube channel worldwide, had filmed at Dark Horse, becoming the first major production to utilize new soundstages. 

And Englebright, who doubled the size of the studios with the expansion, said he sees potential for Wilmington to recruit more content creators' projects as video entertainment continues to shift with social media.
 
Donaldson and his team spent a month filming content at the studio in November and December, Englebright said.

In one of the locally shot videos, “Every Minute One Person is Eliminated,” contestants vied for $500,000. The 34-minute video was posted on YouTube in late January and already has more than 77 million views.

The participants were formerly on Beast Games, Donaldson’s reality competition show that debuted on Amazon's Prime Video in December. Part of MrBeast’s rise in popularity has come from Donaldson’s videos of money giveaways and challenges.
 
MrBeast’s channel has nearly 72 billion views and 358 million subscribers, the largest number of subscribers for any YouTube account, according to Social Blade, which tracks social media analytics.

Englebright said Dark Horse and representatives from MrBeast were talking months before the grand opening of the new soundstages and members of MrBeast’s team attended the event.

“That helped lay the footprint. They were completely blown away for the stages," said Englebright (shown at left with Donaldson).

“They’re the No. 1 YouTube (account) on the planet. They shoot globally,” he added. “I think it was kind of a testament that we did something right because they have the resources and the bandwidth to shoot in any market on the planet that they choose to. And those chose Wilmington, North Carolina.”

While MrBeast’s following is significantly larger than the average content creator, Englebright said viewers' shifting habits could bring opportunity to Wilmington’s film industry.

“There’s so much evolution taking place in the industry, I think we’re going to see a lot more content creators coming to the game,” he said.

Johnny Griffin, director of the Wilmington Regional Film Commission, said the agency will get calls from creators looking for specific locations, but most social media teams don’t have the scale of programming of the MrBeast production company. He added that the film commission does often get requests from reality show projects on traditional platforms.

“We’d like to work with MrBeast,” he said, “if they like to do more work in the area.”

In November, Dark Horse Stages doubled its footprint, opening two new soundstages and adding more than 40,000 square feet to its Harley Road facilities. Each of the 20,000-square-foot soundstages is 55 feet tall.
 
The company in 2023 opened its first two soundstages – taking up 42,500 square feet – and has hosted filming on those initial stages for projects such as George & Tammy and Merv.