As the holiday box office period was winding down, it was looking like movie theaters were facing another deep multi-week slump. But this past weekend, they were able to stem the tide with the help of an unlikely debut filmmaker: Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach.
After 13 years building a YouTube fanbase of 38 million subscribers with his popular “Let’s Play” videos — including a “Five Nights at Freddy’s” series that launched that horror game’s popularity — as well as a variety of creative projects, like his acclaimed Unus Annus series, Fischbach made his directorial debut with “Iron Lung.” The film is an adaptation of David Szymanski’s 2022 independent horror game about a convict forced to explore an ocean of human blood on a faraway planet in the hopes of finding vital resources needed for human life to survive after all habitable planets are mysteriously destroyed.
In an interview with TheWrap, Fischbach said that “Iron Lung” was supposed to get a limited release. But in a video announcing the participating theaters, he noted in a comment that fans could reach out to their local theaters to ask if they could reach out to Fischbach and the “Iron Lung” team to add the film to their multiplexes.
“When I decided to put the film out myself, I didn’t know it was going to be in 3,000 theaters. I thought it would come in 200 theaters max,” he said.
Before long, exhibitors were flooded with emails from Markiplier fans, and “Iron Lung” soon gained the attention of national theater chains like Regal Cinemas. Brooks LeBoeuf, head of content at Regal, said that two members of his team were big fans of Markiplier and convinced him that the YouTuber would be a perfect fit for Regal’s new efforts to expand the types of films and other special events that they offer on the big screen.
As Fischbach put it, Regal “kicked the door down.” And once Regal announced that it would give “Iron Lung” a release across its entire circuit, the fans pounced.
“The movie became a social movement, a lot like the ‘Stranger Things’ finale,” LeBoeuf told TheWrap. “The fans wanted to see this together in a theater, and that’s what we want to provide at Regal. Once Mark made the announcement, it was shared everywhere. The fans did the work of what multimillion marketing budgets do, and we were the benefactor by getting on first.” As a result, “Iron Lung” opened in the No. 2 spot on the box office charts this weekend with a $17.8 million opening weekend, a higher start than recent releases “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” ($14.4 million) and “Mercy” ($10.8 million).
It stands as the highest opening weekend ever for a self-distributed film at a time when self-distribution is slowly growing as an option for independent filmmakers who can’t get the attention of studios or film festivals. It’s also a time when theaters, facing ongoing Hollywood consolidation, have been forced to think outside the box as the biggest studios give them fewer films.
Mark Fischbach spoke with TheWrap about how “Iron Lung” got to this point, how he avoids burnout while chasing his “unhealthy addiction” to creativity, and how he hopes this changes Hollywood’s perception of what YouTubers bring to the world of entertainment.
We’ve seen YouTube personalities like Chris Stuckmann get distribution deals on their feature films, so at least on paper, that was open to you. Why did you decide to go the self-distribution route?
There definitely was potential for conversations, but me being who I am, I was just like, “Well, I can front the bill for the production, so I’m just going to make it and then I’ll see where it lands. And only when it’s good enough, then I’m going to put it out there.”
It never really appealed to me as soon as I started seeing what those [distribution] deals were like on paper: the terms and shares of responsibilities and the things you have to let go of. That has always been a part of the industry and will still be part of the industry for a while because most people, and I readily acknowledge this, don’t have 38 million subscribers, don’t have the ability to self-finance their own movies without severe sacrifice on their own personal life.
So I know that “Iron Lung” is a very exceptional case, but I do think that there’s a lot of extra baggage that comes with some of those deals that makes it so that everything becomes so high risk that it has to have high reward and success, or it’s just a meteoric failure. I think that there’s a world where, if independent filmmakers are able to actually get it into theaters a little bit easier, and they’re able to negotiate on a smaller basis, but with the internet, try to cultivate their own little concentrated fan bases, then they could turn a profit, because the stakes were never so high that a studio needed to have their bottom line matched. The filmmakers had their own bottom line because they knew how much it cost.
So, when I decided to put the film out myself, I didn’t know it was going to be in 3,000 theaters. I thought it would come in 200 theaters max. So I decided I should probably go do this myself. I don’t care about turning a profit. I’m able to say that, so I was able to put more into this movie than probably the average person. But I think it’s just a matter of scale and scope and, with today’s technology, doing things cheaper.
A few years ago we spoke with an independent filmmaker who self-distributed and noted how mentally draining it can be to release a film yourself. You wrote, directed, starred in and edited this film, along with your YouTube work and other creative endeavors. How do you avoid that burnout?
It’s not healthy! I don’t know if anyone should hear this and take any advice from me, but I have been doing YouTube for a very long time, and burnout has been a conversation for YouTubers and online personalities and even streamers, because they stream, like, eight hours a day, six, sometimes seven days a week.
But in my YouTube journey, I haven’t taken weekends off or really gone on that many vacations in the entirety of my 13+ years on YouTube, and that’s just because I have an addiction to making things. A crippling, actually unhealthy addiction. I get so much dopamine and serotonin from the feedback loop of completing a project and immediately jumping into the next one. That’s what makes me want to do so much, but it is still just as stressful to jump from YouTube to my podcast to my clothing company, and then I’m like, “Oh yeah, I got a movie I’m trying to make.” It’s not good, because there are many, many, many sleepless nights, many, many stressful days where I’m just on edge all day.
And I’ll tell you, by the end of this one, I was pretty drained. Even in the final sound sessions to put it all together, It was me and my other editors, Lexi and Sam. I have more part of the team, Marcus, Rachel, Vincent and Nervly, and we were all just slugging Red Bulls, just doing VFX and sound and trying to roto something, and all of it is just in a haze.
All that is to say that I do believe that there is value in kind of destroying yourself for art. I do believe that sometimes it’s worth it to push yourself to an extreme that you don’t know you can do, because at the end of it, you will at least be able to look back and be like, “Oh, wow, I did that. I am capable of that.” … This isn’t like running a marathon or anything, but it’s a creative endeavor that takes everything you have. That’s kind of what art is: to channel the human condition straight through your own body and all the stress that comes with it, and just shotgun blast it onto the screen as best you can and hope that it’s stuck.
It’s not a guarantee that YouTube success equates to box office success. Just as an example, Dude Perfect has had a lot of success online and other spaces, but the theatrical release of their live tour only made around $500,000. But you were able to get your fans to follow through and buy tickets nationwide. How were you able to engage them?
So with my fan base, there are plenty of people that are just like, “I just want to see the games, and I only see them because of the games.” But I would like to think a lot more of my fans watch because it’s me playing the games, or it’s because of the relationship that I have with that audience and how I have evolved my relationship with YouTube itself and the content that I’m making.
My YouTube channel is a bit more of a personal journey of my own ability to make bigger and better things. You can kind of trace it as an arc from when I first started doing sketch comedy, way back in the beginning, like terrible little sketches, but kind of funny. And then it grows in ability — [I got] slightly better equipment — and then, I’m suddenly doing a short film, and then I’m doing a larger YouTube Originals production, and then a sequel to that and then a feature film. People can follow that journey, and that is its own story. I try to cultivate my channel to be less about what I’m doing and more about why I’m doing it. Why I’m destroying myself for art, like I said it is integral to who I am as a person, and if they can see the why of what I’m doing, they understand me a bit better. I try to respect that relationship too, because they’re giving me their time. I always try to make sure that their time is always respected, because time is the most valuable thing anybody has. So if I can respect their time and try to give them better things every time they come by, I’d like to think that they would want to come back, and then they would want to support me.
With the number of Hollywood films put in theaters still 20% down compared to pre-pandemic, the exhibitors have been looking for alternatives that are off the beaten path. What were those conversations with exhibitors like to get “Iron Lung” on their screens? They thought it was bots at first, and they had every reason to believe it, right? They get an email and then another email that’s exactly the same template. Like, the exact same wording. The truth is, some of my audience have a little bit of social anxiety, and they’ve never emailed a company before, so they ask another person in the community, “Hey, how do I do this?” And they’re like, “Oh, this is what I said,” and they copy and they paste it. So at first, there was such a quantity of people that their natural instinct was, “This must be a bot campaign, because I’ve never seen anything like this.”
But the truth is, I just have 38 million subscribers, so there’s a lot of people that are willing to engage with my content and willing to help the outreach. And in truth, I didn’t even ask that much, because what happened was I made a video saying which theaters it was coming out in, and in the comments below it, I made one comment that was like, “Oh, by the way, if it’s not in your theater, you can call and request it and if they get enough demand, they will show the movie.” That’s the only thing I said for people to do outreach, one comment below the video. And that’s what got people to drive off and start to request theaters.
Do you remember the initial conversations you had with the major chains?
I had a call with Cinemark first, and they said that we could test “Iron Lung” in about 40 to 50 theaters. And I thought that was great. Then I get off that call, and the same day, a couple hours later, Regal basically kicked the door down. And it was like, “All the theaters! You want popcorn buckets?! We’ll do everything! Snack combos! We’ll call it the Icy Abyss!” [laughs]. They were just fully onboard. So I just gotta give credit to Regal. They were full believers from the beginning.
While you were able to take advantage of your unique position as a popular YouTuber, there are a lot of people, whether in the new media space or just independent filmmakers, who might want to take this DIY route. Do you have any advice for them?
I’m going to talk to the filmmakers that are maybe less experienced, because that’s where I was just a couple years ago. I would say, start building that audience. Start putting clips of your process on YouTube and start promoting it. Embrace the technology that is coming out today, and I’m not talking about AI here. Embrace the changes in the landscape of how filmmaking is made.
Cameras are much more accessible than ever. I don’t say make a movie on an iPhone, because iPhones are kind of expensive anyway nowadays, but for twice the price of an iPhone, you can get a camera like the Nikon ZX that shoots raw red with all the color space that you could ever possibly want to make your beautiful grades to get great image. Lenses are cheaper and more accessible than ever. You don’t even need to buy your own. You can rent a set. As far as editing, I sing my praises about DaVinci Resolve, because it is just better in every way. It is free to start out with, and then like, 300 bucks for a license, and you can actually find it for cheaper, because most of their products come with a free license for it.
It is a lot of work to try to be the “do everything” guy, but that’s what YouTubers are. When I started YouTube, and a lot of people that started YouTube, they had to do everything themselves. They had to make all the content, they had to write and edit it themselves. They had to make their own thumbnails. They had to do the sound. They had to do the promotion. It’s a very independent filmmaker thing to be a YouTuber.
Once you have those skills and you’ve developed them for a few years, you can put that story in the camera, you can put it on the screen, and then you can just talk to the theaters, because most of the time they’re going to be like, “Hey, if you got something and you can sell it, fine by me.”
And more than ever, theaters are looking for alternatives to what Hollywood is putting out. So as a YouTuber, what does it mean for you to see “Iron Lung” resonate as well as it has? In my mind, YouTube and TV are the same. They’re the exact same level of quality, level of interest. Sometimes YouTube is even better than TV, because you can just find whatever you want. There’s such a bevy of content on YouTube that TV could never actually outpace.
When it comes to theaters, looking at this film and what it has done, I don’t think that too many people would be all that crazy to think that they could put something from YouTube on to movies now, because it is totally possible. It’s just that the scales of success are so distorted that we need to reset them. Like Marvel movies and “Avatar” with huge budgets and making a billion dollars, people think that’s only what success is … If we reset our scales of what these things are, if you make something and it costs $200,000 and you made $500,000 and you do your split, you still got a profit. Like I said, YouTube is a lot like independent filmmaking, and I think that brings a different perspective to all this.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The post How Markiplier and ‘Iron Lung’ Turned the Box Office Upside Down: ‘I Thought It Would Come Out in 200 Theaters’ appeared first on TheWrap.
