A No-Name Director to Everyone but His 38 Million Fans

At the box office earlier this month, four out of the five top-grossing movies were not from big companies. There was Solo Mio, an inspirational romantic drama starring Kevin James from the faith-based distributor Angel Studios; a filmed concert from the K-pop group Stray Kids; and a French adaptation of Dracula from the director Luc Besson that had already made big money overseas. But by far the most unusual offering was Iron Lung, which has thus far grossed more than $30 million domestically against a $3 million budget. It is a strange sci-fi tale of a man exploring a mysterious underwater world, but stranger still is the fact that it’s even in theaters: Iron Lung was funded, made, and released entirely by a YouTuber most famous for playing video games on camera.

The writer-director of Iron Lung is Mark Fischbach, better known as Markiplier—one of the most popular content creators on YouTube, if not the internet. He’s a veteran of the video format known as “Let’s Play,” in which on-screen personalities offer cheeky commentary while running through a video game. The bulk of Fischbach’s work thus mostly features little else but game footage and his cheerful face reacting to whatever he’s playing—usually something of the indie-horror variety. Each of his simple-sounding uploads typically receives millions of views; his channel currently has more than 38 million subscribers. Fischbach has spent nearly 15 years building his audience, establishing himself as a funny, pleasant, and charitable guy on a platform often lacking for them.

But even with those accomplishments, what he’s achieved with Iron Lung is the kind of creative success story most independent artists can only dream of. Fischbach has long explored other such efforts alongside his usual fare; he has launched a clothing line, hosted podcasts, and made interactive, choose-your-own-adventure-style series, also published on YouTube. Fischbach announced in 2023 that he was making his first theatrical film: an adaptation of the video game Iron Lung, which he would write, direct, and star in. He would also be financing, producing, and distributing the project himself, outside of any typical Hollywood structure. Iron Lung was shot over 35 days that spring; it took years to release partly because Fischbach edited it himself, then declined to make a deal with any traditional distributor. Instead, he spent months booking theaters privately, encouraging his fans to reserve tickets online. When prospective viewers realized the film wasn’t screening in their city, they started calling local cinemas to complain. By the end of this grassroots effort, Iron Lung was booked on more than 3,000 screens in North America.

[Read: This guy makes millions playing video games on YouTube]

Fischbach never launched a paid media campaign ahead of release—he simply used his own feeds for promotion, cut his own trailers, and built up anticipation among his large viewer base. The result was a film that almost came out of nowhere, nearly surmounting another new movie with more mainstream clout: Send Help, a star-driven, $40-million thriller from the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios. Send Help opened to $19.1 million, while Iron Lung made $18.3 million in its first weekend, and has since doubled that gross worldwide in just two weeks. Despite knowing practically nothing of Fischbach’s work or the game he was adapting, I was intrigued enough by its origins and audience pull to go see it. I was expecting Iron Lung to be small-scale, given the production cost; I was also anticipating a lot of the cheap thrills that can come with low-budget horror hits—some shocking gore, some jump scares, and a fast-and-simple plot.

Maybe the most intriguing thing about Iron Lung, beyond its unusual release strategy, is that it has basically none of those elements. It’s an odd, heady, talky bit of ambient storytelling that runs for 127 minutes, despite not very much actually happening. As far as I could tell from checking out videos of Fischbach playing the original game, the film translates the premise and gameplay faithfully. Simon (played by Fischbach, replete with tangled hair and clad in a cruddy diving suit) is a convict piloting a ramshackle submarine on a distant moon, where there’s an ocean made of blood. He’s exploring for deep-sea life, perhaps to help undo an unspecified apocalypse that’s seemingly wiped out life around the galaxy, but everything else remains unclear—who sent him below the surface, what monsters reside within, and what will happen with the samples he collects and the freaky X-ray pictures he tries to take.

After a while, I cheerfully gave up on trying to follow the film’s attempt at a narrative. The inscrutability is clearly the point: In scene after scene, Simon’s anxiety mounts as he fiddles with buttons, tries to interpret garbled commands, yells at his higher-ups, and begins to possibly hallucinate. There are no giant frights or dynamic action sequences, and the slow pacing makes the film feel at times punishingly long. Instead, Fischbach aims to keep the audience invested by ratcheting up the sense of atmosphere. The blood-filled waters and the bizarre fish skeletons aside, however, the movie is not quite the Cronenbergian nightmare the director wants it to be. Yet I found myself charmed by Iron Lung’s shagginess; I haven’t seen anything quite like it, and the idea of such a curious piece of art becoming a genuine box-office phenomenon is a little heartwarming.

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Fischbach isn’t the first YouTuber to jump into big-screen filmmaking. Chris Stuckmann, who reviews movies on his channel, released his first feature last year; he funded the project on Kickstarter. After the film, Shelby Oaks, was picked up by the indie distributor Neon, Stuckmann reshot some of the sequences to boost the production value. The end product was nonetheless a critical and commercial disappointment, a work of demonic found-footage pablum that felt imitative of better-known forebears. The Philippou brothers, makers of the much more successful supernatural tales Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, also launched their careers on YouTube; they released an array of shorts that became their calling cards, earning them actual budgets to direct Hollywood movies. Yet Fischbach’s accomplishment is more impressive than those of his cohort: He essentially built the entire engine himself and landed the plane with aplomb. His fully self-driven model is one that other online creators could try to imitate. Even if they do, I wonder whether their artistic instincts would be as unexpected—or captivating.