For years, Hollywood treated YouTubers like obnoxious internet people who should maybe cameo in something if a marketing team got desperate enough. Markiplier, the longtime YouTube creator and horror-gaming star, suggests that era may be ending. On the latest episode of VICE Culture Club with host Jackson Garrett, he makes a pretty direct case that creators no longer need studio permission to make movies people actually love. And he’s demonstrating that with his new indie horror film, based on the video game, Iron Lung.
The game didn’t come with some massive built-in fandom – Markiplier did. He relied on his audience of 38.5 million that he had spent years building online, which is the entire point. He turned that loyal audience into ticket buyers for a film released outside the traditional studio system. That makes Iron Lung feel like more than a passion project. It starts to look like a proof of concept.
Markiplier says that creators have been building the skills for this kind of leap for years. He tells Garrett he had been “trying to make some higher production stuff” through projects like 2017’s A Date With Markiplier and 2022’s In Space With Markiplier. What he’s really saying is that Hollywood didn’t discover that creators could do this. Rather, it just ignored the evidence until it got harder to dismiss.
In Markiplier’s telling, creator-led movies aren’t some early sign of change. The change is already underway. “I don’t even think it’s the beginning,” he says. “I think that it’s already happened.” He follows that with an even stronger prediction: “Yes, it’ll happen again, and it’ll happen many more times.”
That confidence extends to Garrett’s next question about whether creators still need the studio system at all, and Markiplier doesn’t dance around it. “The answer is no,” he says. “I know that’s terrifying to hear.”
What keeps this from turning into empty anti-studio chest-thumping is that he still believes in theaters. “People still want to go to the theater,” he says. “You don’t have to always rely on a $200 million budget to make something. People will still go.”
That makes Iron Lung feel bigger than a creator vanity project. It looks like a test case of what happens when audience trust turns into box-office power. Watch the full Culture Club interview to hear Markiplier explain why creator-led movies may be a lot closer to Hollywood’s future than Hollywood wants to admit.
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