Amazon MGM Studios reportedly spent $35 million marketing Melania: Twenty Days to History, a documentary following the first lady, with $20 million shelled out in U.S. marketing alone. Yet the self-made and self-financed film Iron Lung far surpassed Melania’s box office success this weekend with a bare-bones marketing scheme and a wealth of loyal subscribers.
YouTuber Mark Fischbach, better known as Markiplier, is the man behind Iron Lung, which raked in $18.19 million at the box office last weekend, more than six times the film’s reported $3 million budget. The film ran laps around big studios at the box office, earning more than double the $7 million Amazon brought in with Melania and coming in a close second to Disney’s Sam Raimi–directed horror-thriller Send Help, which earned $19.1 million domestically.
Fischbach got his start on YouTube in 2012. The Hawaii native was then a 22-year-old studying medical engineering at the University of Cincinnati. As he has described publicly, after a rough patch in his final year in college—a breakup with a girlfriend, a tumor in his adrenal gland, being kicked out by his mom, and getting fired—Fischbach set up his YouTube channel as a sort of coping mechanism. He adopted the username Markiplier under which he posted energizing “Let’s Play” videos, testing out survival-horror video games. The channel quickly gained traction, and Fischbach dropped out of college to pursue his YouTube career, which has since evolved into an audience of 38 million for the 36-year-old creator.
Iron Lung is an indie horror film where a convict boards a claustrophobic submarine, sailing through an ocean of blood (80,000 gallons’ worth of fake blood) on a faraway moon. Following the film’s weekend release, Fischbach took to his YouTube channel to make a teary-eyed address to his fan base. “Right now it’s kind of a hero moment to showcase that indie filmmaking was possible,” Fischbach said.
Fischbach built his following as a one-man show. When it came time to promote his film, he stuck to that same solo script. The movie’s marketing entailed a guerrilla operation that started with a YouTube video where Fischbach asked his fan base to call local theaters to feature the film. “If you want it, simply ask your local movie theater if they can [show it] as politely as you can,” Fischbach said to his fans in a YouTube livestream in November. The film ultimately showed at 3,015 theaters in the U.S. and Canada, compared to the 1,778 theaters that showed Melania.
The rise of the creator-led movie
Markiplier is the latest creator to leverage social media capital to propel him into wide-scale success. He follows creators like musical comedian Bo Burnham and Australian YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou, who have broken out of social media to garner success in the film industry.
Marketing experts say the film’s successful rollout could impact how studios consider the marketing of future films. Drew Mitchell, the U.S. lead for the Edelman Gen Z lab, told Fortune he believes film studios could start looking to creators to produce a greater pull for audiences. He said they’ll ask, “Are there creators or individuals that we can work with both from a cast or a creative perspective? And then also how can we bring Gen Z into the marketing directly?”
Mitchell noted how traditional ad campaigns fail to appeal to young audiences. “The traditional top-down system just does not work for Gen Z anymore,” he said. Edelman research shows younger audiences hold grievances toward traditional advertising, with 58% of Gen Z noting distrust of traditional institutions. For younger audiences, multimillion-dollar ad campaigns ring hollow.
“It didn’t really feel like a film that was being sold to audiences,” Mitchell said of Iron Lung. “I think it’s a little bit more about how a community has decided that something is worth going to, something is worth paying attention to.”
In fact, audiences in general today trust influencers more than traditional ads or commercials, with 59% saying their opinion is impacted by influencers before buying from a brand, compared to just 50% saying ads or commercials play a role in their decision, according to Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer. “There’s a huge amount of trust and credibility among influencers,” Timothy Calkins, clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told Fortune. “It’s really interesting how much people trust the people they see on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram.”
For Fischbach, his YouTube origins are a point of pride. “Where I came from made me able to do the things that I’m able to do,” he said in a livestream last Sunday. “It’s going to keep making me able to do the things that I’m able to do all the way into the future.”
