Could YouTuber Markiplier’s Original Film Be Releasing In Theaters This Year?
Longtime YouTuber Mark Fischbach, best known under his screen name Markiplier, has nearly 40 million dedicated fans following his gaming channel.
Over the past few years, he’s taken on plenty of creative side projects, including several choose-your-own-adventure films that were released as related short YouTube videos exclusively on the platform. Now, he’s headed to theaters with his very own original film.
The film will be an adaptation of the popular 2022 video game Iron Lung. The game, set in a futuristic universe on a small moon planet, follows a convicted prisoner who is sent on an expedition to chart an ocean made of blood. The entire game is told through first-person perspective on a tiny submarine, with the player’s primary goal being to navigate the sea using the submarine and take photos using the sub’s limited camera.
Fischbach first played the game only about a week after it first released, and the video achieved over ten million views. Having fallen in love with the unique play style, Fischbach later announced a movie based on the game in 2023. The first trailer aired later that year.
Filming completed in 2024, but Fischbach has since been spending his time planning for the film’s theatrical release. The movie even achieved a record-breaking amount of fake blood used on set — to successfully mimic the original game’s blood ocean, of course.
Since the announcement that filming was completed, fans have been speculating on when its official release date will be. The general consensus seems to be that, now that distribution work is officially underway, the movie will likely be scheduled to release sometime in the latter half of 2025 or early in 2026.
However, some subscribers have speculated that Fischback is having trouble releasing his movies in theaters. Though he confirmed in late 2024 that things were moving forward regarding a theatrical release, there have been no further announcements made about potential release dates, and fans are concerned that this indicates Iron Lung may not be picked up by theaters for some time.
It’s expected that we’ll see some sort of announcement regarding Iron Lung’s progress quite soon. Ideally, the theater will begin promotion within the second or third quarter of 2025, and the release date will be scheduled for the fourth quarter of the year. But we all know that movie theater schedules don’t often follow the ideal, so fans are impatiently waiting the next update.