The film industry is synonymous with Hollywood for a reason. Think of the last time you watched a blockbuster film, produced in the last few years, with a relatively unknown cast and studio.
Does nothing come to mind? That’s not surprising.
In recent years, it seems that the film market has only recycled the same studios, the same concepts, and the same list of current famous actors. Yes, it’s fun to see star-studded casts with endless budgets, but when it’s those same actors, over twenty years, is anything worth watching anymore?
This is a common complaint among film enjoyers as modern cinema feels increasingly impersonal. An industry made for telling stories and works of art, now feels like a content farm made for monopolizing off the same faces. For new filmmakers wanting a chance for the big break, it’s almost impossible without connections nowadays. The entertainment/movie industry has become oversaturated with generational fame.
That is, unless you’re a YouTuber.
Mark Edward Fischbach is a Korean-American YouTuber known online as Markiplier, is one of Gen Z’s most popular Internet celebrities. Hawaii-born Fischbach first began content creation in 2012. He quickly gained popularity with his gaming-commentary videos, and has since amassed 38 million followers on YouTube alone.
Fischbach’s rise to fame has offered him opportunities beyond the Internet, with original content, and his own clothing line called Cloak. Most famously, Fischbach has turned to acting in a number of films and shows. This includes simple YouTube productions (In Space with Markiplier, 2022-), and various roles in other shows such as The Edge of Sleep (2024). This isn’t unheard of for internet celebrities to feature in official films, but it’s an entirely different story for one to make an independent film.
In 2022, Fischbach released the playthrough of Iron Lung, an indie game produced by Dave Szymanski that same year. Set in a future where humans have colonized space, gameplay entirely consists of navigating in a submarine. As a silent protagonist, you must navigate through an ocean made of blood using only the navigational equipment in front of you. Its oppressive atmosphere, paired with the uncertainty and hopelessness of the task ahead, makes for a short and horrifying game.
Overall, it made for a short and interesting playthrough, and sales continued to increase after release– however, it was unexpected for such a one-time game to become a movie.
With a budget of just $3 million, Iron Lung’s film adaptation was announced in June of 2023, and was directed, produced, and written by Fischbach. He was also the lead actor, alongside actress Caroline Rose Kaplan. It used 80,000 gallons of blood for production, now holding the record for most fake blood used on a movie set.
The movie’s status as a self-financed film is what brought it trouble at the box office, as it experienced several glitches at the box office. It was even replaced as #2, with the notoriously rated Melania. Even with the setbacks, Iron Lung earned $9 million in the opening weekend– making three times its budget in less than a week.
Despite its mixed reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, Iron Lung is a film made from passion. It doesn’t rely on shock value or jumpscares– it relies on the growing feeling of dread to unsettle you. As one fan puts it, “The movie was slow, it inched out more and more until it grabbed you. Even when it grabbed and pulled during action packed scenes, it was uncomfortably slow.” Though that could be a flaw in its own right, it’s a breath of fresh air in today’s fast-paced films.
In an industry where films go too fast to process, it’s like a breath of fresh air.
The film also heavily relies on practical effects, making things feel that much more grounded. Though horror often loves the supernatural, reality can be just as scary, when “Everything could be felt in real time, [while watching] the slow descent of the sub’s already flimsy condition.”
Most crucially, the film reflects its source material in a way that game-to-film adaptations fail. It captures more than the idea, the characters, the gameplay; it takes the core feeling of the game and infuses that into every shot of the film.
It feels like the writers actually understood the material, and wanted to capture it in its entirety. Compared to films such as A Minecraft Movie (2025), one was made for money, while the other was made to carry a story.
