American Ninja Warrior season 16

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The sixteenth season of American Ninja Warrior premiered on June 3, 2024, on NBC. A spin-off from the Japanese reality series Sasuke, it is hosted by Matt Iseman, Akbar Gbaja-Biamila, and Zuri Hall.

The season was officially announced by NBC in late March.^[1][2][3]

Like in season 15, the qualifying course starts with the Pole Vault and ends with the Warped Wall, with an attempt at the 18.5-foot Mega Wall available for anyone who finishes the course in under 1 minute and 20 seconds; the instant reward for successfully completing the Mega Wall, once again sponsored by Wells Fargo, was doubled to $20,000 this season. The Runoffs also returned; like in the previous season, the bottom two male contestants and two female contestants on the leaderboard (12th and 13th places) would race side-by-side on the four-obstacle course with the winners earning the last spot in the semifinals.

  Denotes obstacles created by fans for the Obstacle Design Challenge.

The eight qualifiers, divided into five nights, took place on the lot of Universal Studios Hollywood in Los Angeles, California. Like Season 15, the number of semifinalists remained at 16, and men and women have completely separate leaderboards. The top 11 men and top 3 women advance to the semifinals immediately, while the next two men (12th/13th place) and the next two women (4th/5th place) compete head-to-head in "The Runoffs" for the final spots.

  Denotes expanded course (Mega Wall) finishes

  Denotes runoff winners who advanced to semifinals

  Denotes rookie contestants

Three new obstacles were introduced in the qualifying course: Reel to Reel, Dangerous Waters, and Duck Duck Goose (an Obstacle Design Challenge creation).

This course introduced one new obstacle, Heavy Metal.

The four semifinal rounds, divided over two nights, were taped at the same Universal Studios lot where the qualifiers were filmed during two nights. This season will be the second under the new format which was introduced in Season 15 in which the semifinals have competitors race head-to-head in pairs. They are seeded based on the overall results in the leaderboard table which is created by merging 2 leaderboards from qualifying courses with the same obstacles. During the races, all the winners and the two losers who reached the farthest obstacle in the least amount of time (unless there were more than two losers who finished the semi-final course) all advanced to the National Finals. Meanwhile, the two fastest winners proceed to a modified head-to-head course at the end of each night where they race for a Safety Pass, an option for a second attempt on Stage 1 of the Finals.

  Denotes losers also advancing to National Finals

  Denotes Safety Pass winners runs

On March 18, 2024, NBC revealed the premiere date and timeslot for the season.^[2][3] The program's longtime timeslot, Mondays 8 p.m. ET, was kept (with reruns scheduled to air in various slots due to sports); however for this season, episodes would mostly revert back to the previous two-hour format (with some exceptions), after Season 15 consisted mostly of one-hour episodes – mainly during the qualifying and early semifinal rounds – to allow the network to run a competition-based Monday prime time lineup for its Summer 2023 schedule (accompanied by fellow game shows The Wall and The Weakest Link, both of which share the lead out time slot this season).