One of the biggest Hollywood stories of 2026 has been directors who cut their teeth on YouTube finding smash-hit success at the box office. Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons‘ Backrooms have rightfully grabbed headlines for drawing audiences to their unique, low-budget horror tales. But the trend kicked off much earlier in the year, when Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach’s Iron Lung hit the number two spot on its opening weekend, finishing behind Sam Raimi’s Send Help but ahead of the Melania Trump documentary. And even more impressive as far as Iron Lung is concerned, while Obsession and Backrooms had the backing of, respectively, Focus Features and A24, Markiplier’s adaptation of the 2022 video game by David Szymanski was self-financed and distributed by the writer-director-editor-star’s own Markiplier Studios. His YouTube fan base—he has nearly 39 million subscribers on the platform—surely played a role in his $50 million box-office success, and he’s now using his newfound clout even beyond the internet to help other creators get a leg up. In a new interview with IndieWire, Markiplier talked about what he’s been up to since Iron Lung helped reshape the current movie landscape.
“I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of studios that have been both fruitful and not fruitful,” he said. “Honestly, it’s been good to have those conversations because it means that more people are curious about what creators can offer.”
