Last December, Sarah Pitre, the head film buyer for Alamo Drafthouse, did not know who Markiplier was. But fans of the YouTube creator, who has over 38 million subscribers, were already calling her theaters to demand they screen his upcoming movie.
As fans scooped up presale tickets ahead of the film’s Jan. 30 release, Pitre added showtimes to keep up with demand. “Iron Lung,” the self-funded horror film directed by and starring Markiplier, born Mark Fischbach, debuted as the No. 2 movie in the country in the same opening weekend as “Melania,” the $74 million documentary about Melania Trump, which debuted at No. 3 and brought in just $7 million.
“This is a gift for movie theaters, so I hope it keeps happening,” Pitre said.
As Hollywood puzzles over how to get people to buy movie tickets, Fischbach and a handful of other filmmakers have leveraged direct relationships with fans to get theatrical releases without the marketing push of a big studio.
Fischbach spent less than $3 million to make “Iron Lung,” which is based on an indie video game by the same title that was released in 2022. The game, in which a submarine pilot navigates an ocean of human blood on an alien moon, had its own cachet among fans of the developer David Szymanski, who previously created a breakout hit with “Dusk.”
Fischbach cast fellow creators and a few video game actors for minor roles and, over the three years it took to shoot and edit, kept fans abreast of the film’s progress. On his YouTube account, where he typically publishes videos of himself playing games, he posted behind-the-scenes stories and teaser trailers.
When it came time to champion the movie for a theatrical release, he said he initially looked to Centurion Film Service, an independent booking company. On an episode of the Hollywood-focused podcast “The Town With Matt Belloni,” Fischbach said he brushed aside t he company’s offers of only three theaters. “I told them that three theaters would be insulting to my audience,” Fischbach said.
So he went directly to that audience. In community hubs like Reddit, fans rallied and offered advice on how to contact theaters and what to say. “I try to make sure that I don’t ask my fan base very much very often, so that when it counts it really counts, and when I need it, it’s a human connection,” Fischbach said on the podcast. “That way it really is organic when it comes to the growth of it.” In just a few months, the grass roots campaign helped land “Iron Lung” on 2,500 screens (on par with “Melania”).
A month before the movie’s release, he published a tearful thanks to fans “It’s been so hard to juggle all of this for so long,” he said. “I just never expected something like this.”
Early reviews of the bloody, two-hour psychological horror film, in which Fischbach is a near-constant presence, have skewed positive. (It has an 89 percent rating from fans on the Popcornmeter of RottenTomatoes.com, but only a 59 percent splat from critics.)
Last fall, online popularity landed theatrical releases for episodes of the animated YouTube show “Battle for Dream Island,” from Jacknjellify, the channel created by the brothers Cary and Michael Huang. Those screenings often sold out in theaters across AMC, Cinemark and Marcus. Kane Parsons, 20, is set to direct a horror feature called “The Backrooms” for A24 based on a YouTube short he published in 2022.
In recent years, the pop music superstars Beyoncé and Taylor Swift evaded the studio system, securing widespread releases for tour documentaries that their companies had produced. Billie Eilish will follow suit when hers, co-directed by James Cameron, hits big screens on March 20.
For theaters, the revenue from “Iron Lung” is just one boon. It’s also attracting younger audiences, who are more likely than older viewers to attend theatrical screenings. An employee at the AMC theater in Bridgewater, N.J., the smallest of the chain’s locations in the state, said staff members there had been surprised when “Iron Lung” landed a spot on one of its seven screens — and “Melania” did not. “We all thought that it was going to go to ‘Melania,’ because we had the ‘Melania’ poster, we had the ‘Melania’ trailers,” he said. “For ‘Iron Lung,’ we had nothing.”
Audience numbers dropped during weekday screenings last week, the employee, who was not authorized by AMC to comment, said. “It’s mostly teenagers,” the employee said, many of whom aren’t old enough to get into the R-rated film on their own. Those turned away have gotten intrepid, however. “They come back with random strangers they find in the mall,” according to the employee.
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