Did you hear about the movie that surprised just about everyone at the box office this weekend?
Nope, not “Melania” — though the sort-of-documentary about the first lady did do better than industry folks had projected, bringing in $7 million in its first weekend.
The real hit of the weekend was made by someone you probably haven’t heard of, unless you are a very specific kind of online person: “Iron Lung,” a horror/sci-fi movie, written, directed by, and starring Mark Fischbach, known to his fans as Markiplier on YouTube, where he has 38.2 million subscribers.
“Iron Lung” brought in $22 million worldwide, with almost all of that coming from the US over the past few days. Which means Fischbach, who self-financed the movie and says he spent “a few million dollars” on it, has probably already turned a profit on the project. (Amazon, meanwhile, has spent a reported $75 million to make and promote “Melania”, and will be very hard pressed to make that money back — not that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos likely cares about that.)
And that means Fischbach has done what the entertainment industry has been waiting a very, very long time to see: He’s turned a big online audience into movie ticket sales.
Again, for comparison: “Melania” got a huge promotional rollout from Amazon, aided by the likes of Fox News, which brought Melania Trump on air for multiple interviews, and the president of the United States himself, who pushed the film on his social media accounts. That effort helped generate an estimated 600,000 ticket sales.
Fischbach, meanwhile, just used his YouTube presence to push the movie and asked fans to call and email theater owners to convince them to show it. That eventually got the movie onto about 4,000 screens worldwide and led to an estimated 1.9 million in ticket sales.
Of course, you could also argue that these movies are more alike than similar: Critics thought “Melania” was awful, and the few people who reviewed “Iron Lung” aren’t in love with it either.
Also: Neither movie was made for cineastes, but for fans who wanted to show up to signal their allegiance to the creator/subject. For “Melania,” that meant an audience that looked a lot like grandmothers (70% of the audience was female, and 72% was 55 or older, per The Ankler), and for “Iron Lung”, that meant an audience that could have been their grandsons (61% male, 62% 25 and under).
The other big difference is that we’re unlikely to see many more Big Media companies make a movie designed (just about) explicitly to flatter the president of the United States and his wife.
But many people are interested in transforming YouTube success into other platforms. It just hasn’t happened much. Prior to this weekend, we’ve only seen that happen with Mr. Beast and his Amazon show. Next question: Can anyone else make the leap?
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