How a YouTuber Beat the First Lady

Plus: Why you need to see ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.’

Mark Edward “Markiplier” Fischbach in Iron Lung. (Via IMDB)

OVER THE WEEKEND, a strange thing happened at the box office. A movie in a genre that often doesn’t do terribly well amassed a surprisingly large audience thanks to the cult of personality surrounding the person who made it. The film blew past tracking expectations, leading to a series of headlines about the picture’s surprise success. The subject’s fans were thrilled; others, just kind of confused. How could this happen? What is the world coming to?

I speak, of course, about the success of Iron Lung, the new film from YouTube superstar Mark Edward Fischbach, aka Markiplier. (What, you thought I was referring to someone else?)

Fischbach parlayed his enormous YouTube audience—38 million subscribers and counting—into an opening weekend that nearly trumped Sam Raimi and 20th Century Studios’ Send Help¹ for the top spot. The $17.8 million grossed by Iron Lung was also more than twice as much as Amazon-MGM’s documentary-cum-bribe, Melania, a movie that cost $40 million to produce and another $35 million to advertise. Fischbach wouldn’t tell Matt Belloni precisely how much he spent producing Iron Lung, his adaptation of David Szymanski’s indie horror game. Still, he did admit to being in the black after presales of just $7 million.

“There are individuals that can activate their fan bases in unique ways right now and I think both Taylor [Swift’s Eras Tour concert film] and Iron Lung are proof of that,” said Ben Everard, an independent producer whose newest films, Way of the Warrior Kid (starring Chris Pratt) and The Man with the Bag (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Alan Ritchson), will drop later this year. “People showed up in droves for a movie that obviously had a very nontraditional marketing component to it.”

Good for Markiplier. And good for the theatrical industry! January and February are notoriously slow months at the box office, particularly in the post-COVID age. The number of new releases has steadily dipped over the years, and the first couple months of the year have always been something of a dumping ground regardless. As Everard noted in our chat, one of the reasons theaters were willing to test out Taylor Swift’s concert film because it was kind of a dead stretch in the release calendar. Iron Lung demonstrates further that there is upside to theaters experimenting with nontraditional releases and nontraditional filmmakers to create box office buzz.

The question remains whether or not this sort of thing is too rare to replicate on a regular basis. Another YouTuber with a pretty substantial audience, Chris Stuckmann, released a horror film last year through distributor Neon; it grossed just $6 million over the course of its theatrical run. Not bad for its budget (he raised more than a million bucks on Kickstarter), but not Iron Lung numbers either. Stuckmann has a ton of subscribers on YouTube—more than 2 million—but that number is an order of magnitude smaller than Fischbach’s.

The real issue here is one of marketing. Creating awareness is hard! (See my item below on Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.) But Taylor Swift doesn’t need to run an eight-figure ad campaign when she has a movie coming out; she just needs to activate her legion of fans. And Mark Fischbach doesn’t need to run a Melania-style advertising blitz to get viewers to show up, he just needs to tell his 38 million viewers he has something in the works. However, this is a very rare tier of creator, very exclusive company. It’s probably not the future of theatrical filmmaking. But, possibly, it’s one leg of the stool that will help support it going forward.

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Sam Rockwell in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. (Courtesy Briarcliff Entertainment)

GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE is a vanishingly rare sort of movie: a mid-budget high-concept sci-fi-action-anthology that’s getting a full-on theatrical release. It stars the Oscar-winning Sam Rockwell and is directed by Gore Verbinski, who has a lifetime box office gross in the billions. Odds are you haven’t heard of it.

That’s because, as I’ve said, creating awareness and creating desire are two very hard things to do. You have to educate people that a thing exists. You have to hammer home that there’s a film out and that it’s called Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. You need to remind them over and over again about this Good Luck movie and that it stars Sam Rockwell and that it’s from the guy who made the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films. You have to keep repeating this information about Pirates of the Caribbean and Sam Rockwell and the name of the film, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, over and over again, until people recognize it.

See how annoying that paragraph above is? You have to repeat the title—Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, remember—numerous times in a variety of different ways. No one likes that. Indeed, you may have clicked away while reading it. (I’m glad you came back, I have a point!) The point is that creating awareness is hard. It’s hard, and the only way to make it less hard, really, is by spending a TON OF MONEY ON ADS. But spending a ton of money on ads means that turning a profit on this film will be almost impossible. Because you’re just using that money to put the idea into their brain that this thing exists. Once you’ve done that, you have to create desire to see that thing.

And creating desire to see the thing that you’ve finally made them aware of? EVEN HARDER. You have to hit them over and over again, you have to beg them not just for their attention but also their time and their money. You have to send your people out to do interviews with every schmuck who has a microphone in the hopes that 1 or 2 percent of their listeners will decide to give this thing a shot. It’s a crapshoot. Markiplier and Tay-Tay have a shortcut: enormous, passionate fanbases. A movie like Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die? A tougher row to hoe.

Anyway, turns out I’m a schmuck with a microphone so I talked to Matthew Robinson, the writer of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, on my podcast this week:"

I hope you listen to that interview and enjoy it! And then, maybe, you’ll go see the movie. It’s both fun and poignant, a reminder of the humanity we sometimes sacrifice by giving in to screens and the infinite video scroll and AI nonsense. It’s occasionally a little silly, given that it’s about a time-traveling soldier who shows up at a Norm’s diner wearing garbage bags in the hopes of saving the world, but that’s a good thing: We need a little silliness in our life. And trust me: Sam Rockwell’s monologue in the opening twelve minutes is worth the price of admission alone. Just a bravura speech that’ll make you want to stand up and salute the screen if you’ve ever found yourself looking around and thinking, ‘Man, every single person here has their face jammed in a phone. What are we doing to ourselves?’

So take your eyes off that flickering little distraction box in your pocket and affix it to the awesome might of your local multiplex’s 30-foot-high beacon of hope. Let yourself get absorbed in a story rather than distracted by slop. You’ll thank me for it.

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Assigned Viewing: The Ring (Kanopy)

I asked Robinson which films he would recommend checking out to prepare for Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (in theaters February 13!) and he had a lot of good recommendations, including Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys and the short film on which it is based, Chris Marker’s La Jetée. But I’d like to recommend Gore Verbinski’s The Ring. In part because it’s as stylish and as good-looking a horror movie as has, maybe, ever been made. (Seriously: One of the great joys of watching Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is just how striking it looks. Verbinski is operating on a visual level that nearly no other mainstream filmmaker approaches.)

But also because there’s this very funny moment in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die where kids are watching a TikTok-like stream of slop and the disconnected images most called to mind the horrifying videotape from The Ring. The imagery is off-putting but real, creating a sort of dissonance in the viewer that is hypnotically unsettling and also very funny.

1. Accidentally posted this with the title “Get Help” rather than “Send Help.” This is what I get for writing on an airplane! I apologize to Sam Raimi for the error. -SB