The gaming YouTuber with over 38 million subscribers has generated a box office hit, bringing in just under $9 million from approximately 3,000 theaters upon opening on Friday. Markiplier’s self-funded, directed, and starring performance in Iron Lung has been met with a 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.  

Iron Lung is an adaptation of a horror sci-fi game that was released in 2022, one that Markiplier did a play-through of on his YouTube channel. The film follows Simon, played by Markiplier, who is a convict that is sent to a moon in an iron submersible to scour a blood ocean. It is in a post-apocalyptic future following a devastating event known as “The Quiet Rapture” that made stars and planets uninhabitable. His character is searching this moon and the blood ocean in the hopes of locating missing stars or planets to allow other survivors to have somewhere to live that is not a spacecraft.

Markiplier isn’t the first YouTuber to become a success story in the Hollywood horror genre. Back in 2022, the YouTube duo Michael and Danny Philippou, also known as RackaRacka, largely funded and directed their directorial debut Talk to Me. At the conclusion of its global release, the film grossed $92 million worldwide against a production budget of $4.5 million. They followed up this highly touted horror film with Bring Her Back in 2025, grossing $39.4 million worldwide against a $15 million budget. It is estimated that Mark Fischbach’s Iron Lung has a production budget of less than $3 million, so the film is already off to a massive start against this budget. The film’s supporting cast includes Caroline Kaplan, Troy Baker, Elsie Lovelock and Elle Lamont.

The independently released Iron Lung is currently playing in over 4,000 theaters globally.