YouTuber Mark ‘Markiplier’ Fischbach has made an indie hit with his sci-fi horror debut, Iron Lung – currently number two at the US box office. YouTube has just spawned a true indie auteur. Iron Lung, directed, written by, starring and edited by Mark ‘Markiplier’ Fischbach, made a surprisingly large $17.8 million in US cinemas – ... Iron Lung | YouTuber auteur’s indie horror storms the US box office
YouTuber Mark ‘Markiplier’ Fischbach has made an indie hit with his sci-fi horror debut, Iron Lung – currently number two at the US box office.
YouTube has just spawned a true indie auteur. Iron Lung, directed, written by, starring and edited by Mark ‘Markiplier’ Fischbach, made a surprisingly large $17.8 million in US cinemas – placing it just behind Sam Raimi’s much starrier Send Help, which made $20m.
Produced for just under $3m, and shot at Robert Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios, Iron Lung is a murky sci-fi odyssey about a submariner named Simon (Fischbach) exploring an alien ocean in his claustrophobic submersible. The ocean appears to be composed entirely from blood, and contains all manner of skeletons and unholy secrets.
Based on the videogame of the same name, Iron Lung was heavily promoted on Fischbach’s YouTube channel, which has over 38 million subscribers. Fischbach was so successful at mobilising that potential audience that a film initially destined to be shown on a handful of screens was instead shown on 3,000 across the US according to Variety.
It’s a further example of a YouTube filmmaker making a successful jump over to features. In artistic terms the Philippou brothers have made perhaps the biggest impression so far, having made the beautiful-looking – and disturbing – horror movies Talk To Me and Bring Her Back.
Then there’s Chris Stuckmann, who began life as a film reviewer on YouTube before making his feature debut Shelby Oaks in 2024. Made for just $1m, it got a major boost when it was picked up by indie distributor Neon for a cinema release last October, where it did a not-too-shabby $6m at the US box office.
None of those movies enjoyed an opening weekend remotely like Iron Lung's however; even Talk To Me, which went on to make $92m worldwide, debuted to $10.4m on its first weekend of release, which was considered a surprise success at the time.
Iron Lung’s following is all the more impressive given the competition; much of the past week’s entertainment news has been taken up by Melania, the puff-piece documentary about the wife of one Donald Trump. Some outlets have praised that film’s $7m opening weekend take as a win, though given that Amazon spent a startling $35m on marketing the thing, it was bound to make some sort of impact, especially in parts of the US that skew more to the political right.
There’s something vaguely fitting, too, about Iron Lung running so close behind a horror thriller directed by Sam Raimi. Raimi himself began his career as an indie outsider, running around making zero-budget movies with his friend, Bruce Campbell. The Evil Dead made him famous (and infamous) at the age of just 22; he’s spent the subsequent 45 years alternating between big-budget comic book capers (Spider-Man, Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness) and more personal genre pieces.
If Raimi were starting his career in the 2020s, he’d probably be making short films on YouTube. You can listen to Simon Brew’s chat with Raimi in this week’s Film Stories Podcast.
