The hotly anticipated debut film from globally influential YouTuber Mark Fischbach, aka Markiplier, outdid everyone’s expectations. Earning over 17.8 million domestically and another 21.7 million globally according to Forbes, Iron Lung topped the weekend’s box office charts alongside Sam Raimi’s Send Help, beating out Melania. Markiplier’s success is a testament to the power of indie filmmaking, particularly coming from YouTube content creators, who have struggled against the stigma Hollywood has placed against them.
However, Iron Lung’s success doesn’t just help YouTubers, but also the Video Game industry. Recent years have seen a rise in Video Game adaptations in television and film, from Nintendo’s Mario movies, the Minecraft film, and the Fallout Amazon series. Like every other new medium, video games have long had a stigma against them. Whether they were just a fun thing for children or a waste of time, the video game industry had to fight to be taken seriously by creatives.
Since the early 2010s, the video game industry has grown into a behemoth, as one of the most lucrative in the entertainment market, generating over 188 billion annually in revenue. Despite that success, there remains a hesitance to see the medium as capable of generating meaningful storytelling. Despite how well movies like Super Mario Bros, the Minecraft movie, or Five Nights at Freddy’s do at the box office, these films are made primarily to be spectacles for their fans to enjoy.
That isn’t to say that movies like these shouldn’t be made, but what Iron Lung does differently is take that source material and adapt it faithfully and be gripping enough that it can aesthetically appeal to fans and mainstream audiences alike. Additionally, it shows that video game adaptations don’t need these massive movie budgets that giant video game companies can afford.
