Mark Fischbach, better known as Markiplier, is one of the most successful, long-running YouTubers in the field. His turn behind the camera has yielded similar success, as he directed and starred in the feature film adaptation of the horror game Iron Lung. The film has netted $50 million on a roughly $4 million budget, competing with studio offerings on a legitimately grassroots distribution campaign. Fischbach now warns Hollywood to ignore fellow YouTubers at its peril.
“At least a lot of Hollywood was willfully ignoring the potential of YouTubers here,” Fischbach told the Lemonade Stand podcast (via PC Gamer). “There is that level of respect that I just haven’t met yet.”
Fischbach has been posting videos since 2012. Best known for let’s plays of horror games like Five Nights at Freddy’s and Amnesia, he has not faltered in popularity or spiraled out like many of his contemporaries. In 2023, he stated his intention to write, direct, star and distribute a film based on David Szymanski’s game Iron Lung, in which the player pilots a claustrophobic, windowless submarine in a deep ocean of blood.
“They said it shouldn’t be done. Not that it couldn’t be done,” Fischbach told Variety. “People have made movies before, just that it would be ‘woefully unwise’ to tackle writing, directing, acting and editing a movie myself.”
Unassuming, independent films have stunned the box office in the past. With a leaner budget and a mighty return, Iron Lung joins the ranks of hits like 2002’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the independent Canadian comedy that twisted a $5 million budget into a nearly $400 million box office haul. One of the films Iron Lung competed against was Send Help, the latest gross-out thriller from Sam Raimi, who stormed Hollywood with his own shoestring 1981 horror classic The Evil Dead.
But what seems to stick in the paw of YouTubers like Fischbach isn’t commercial success. In all likelihood, content creators at his level make more money than most working Hollywood directors. It’s the more elusive prestige factor that haunts them.
The umbrage is reminiscent of that expressed by Kevin Perjurer (aka Defunctland), who dovetails his very good video about unaccredited TV jingle composers with a grievance about online documentaries not holding the same space as conventionally produced ones. Given that the documentary space largely filters towards Netflix true-crime specials, I wonder if these creators are agonizing for a status that rarely exists for anyone, even within the current system.
Additionally, it may have been the case in 2023, but Hollywood studios do not seem to be ignoring YouTubers anymore. In 2025, NEON released Shelby Oaks, a horror film from YouTuber Chris Stuckmann, though the film’s impression on critics and the box office was far more modest.
Elsewhere, A24 recently unveiled the trailer for The Backrooms, a big-screen adaptation of the liminal YouTube phenomenon, helmed by 20-year old Kane Parsons, who’s responsible for the viral videos. I have also been told in private conversations that online hitmakers are optioned by Hollywood pretty frequently for their creations, but that they often die on the vine before reaching the public.
For his film, Fischbach says he’d hesitate adapting another video game, preferring not to pigeonhole himself like Resident Evil helm and ultimate wife guy Paul W.S. Anderson. Less surprisingly, Fischbach added that studio reception to him has changed since Iron Lung’s success, saying he’s already met with executives, though they largely just want to know how he pulled it off. “They’re all asking me the same thing,” says Fischbach. “’How’d you do it? How’d you do it?’”
