‘Studios should be scared’: Could this YouTube star’s box office hit change cinema forever?

Earlier this month, a new film shook the cinema industry to its core. Iron Lung, a low-budget adaptation of an obscure indie video game, topped the Australian box office, put more butts on seats than 20th Century Studios’ horror hit Send Help in the US, and made back its budget a staggering 16 times over.

It gets even stranger. The film didn’t come from a studio – not even a small-scale, independent one. Instead, it was written, directed, financed and distributed by one YouTuber: Mark Edward Fischbach, or as his 38 million subscribers know him, Markiplier.

Set in a post-apocalyptic future, Iron Lung follows a convict (played by Fischbach himself) who must pilot a rusty, sealed submarine through an ocean of blood on a barren moon, hoping to find resources vital for humanity’s survival. Now about three weeks into its cinematic run, the grungy horror-thriller has made almost $68 million globally off a $4.2 million production budget.

Until now, this kind of success was practically unheard of without studio backing, especially for films with such low budgets. Could Iron Lung have kicked off a cinematic revolution?

“Studios should be scared. They should be aware of this,” Fischbach says. “If they’re not challenged with competition, they won’t innovate. Everyone was telling me that everyone is having meetings about this, which is good … They could think something like, ‘OK, what if we take smaller ideas that are slightly cheaper, but have the backing of this person with an audience?’ Because I think a lot of these movies have huge, inflated budgets, and they don’t need to have that to be of quality.”

Audience is key here. After pitching his idea to several studios early on (to which they all responded: “That’s really neat. No way in hell are we ever going to do it”), Fischbach knew he needed to find a way to get Iron Lung in theatres. So, he left a comment under one of his YouTube videos informing fans that they could request theatres to show certain films. If enough people requested it, most cinemas would find a way to screen the movie. Suddenly, an overwhelming fan campaign began.

“That’s all I did – I put a comment on my own video – and then suddenly they just ravenously started contacting all these theatres around them to the point where the theatres were posting on social media saying, ‘You don’t need to keep contacting us. We heard you’. That’s the danger of having so many subscribers. I have 38 million subscribers. Not all of them are active all the time, but if even 1 per cent of them contacts theatres, that’s 380,000 people reaching out.”

This is, in large part, how Iron Lung became such a phenomenon. With barely any marketing spend behind it, Fischbach relied almost entirely on his existing fan-base and strong word-of-mouth. This social media power has, to a certain extent, been underestimated by film studios, Fischbach says. He isn’t the first YouTuber to venture into film – RackaRacka (The Philippou Brothers) created Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, both of which were hugely successful, and YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann released the slightly less successful Shelby Oaks. Notably, all of these films were supported by studios (A24 and Neon, respectively).

Though the Philippous and Stuckmann were given a chance, Fischbach’s rejection proved it’s still a rarity for studios to take a risk on social media players, despite their distinct strengths.

“As a YouTuber, you’re responsible for cultivating the idea, executing it and then getting it out in front of everybody. That’s the natural course of life [on YouTube],” Fischbach says. “That eliminates a lot of redundancy in the [filmmaking] system, of which I believe there’s a lot of, kind of, hangovers from how it used to be, which was much more complicated before advances in technology. There’s still some catching up to do.”

He didn’t make Iron Lung completely alone, of course. He acknowledges his director of photography Philip Roy, the camera crew and Centurion Film Service, which assisted with independent theatre distribution. But at the end of the day, whether the film lived or died rested on Fischbach’s shoulders.

So, could we see more of this in the future? Fischbach says he will definitely make more films, and he hopes others like him – YouTubers with a keen passion for film and high-quality content – can also overcome the “tall golden gates” of Hollywood.

“I’m not even in the new generation [of YouTube],” he says. “You should see what the people after me are going to do. They’re going to be crazy. It’ll be a fun time.”

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