|
 |
Hey, guys—greetings from D.C., where I’m on a reporting trip. Thanks, as always, for reading this newsletter. If you enjoy the guidance it provides—what to see, like the Sam Rockwell movie discussed below, or not to see, like MELANIA—consider picking up a Bulwark+ membership. Not only will that let you join in the comments so we can discuss these films, and give you access to all our members-only locked Bulwark content, but you’ll be helping to keep this ship afloat. We’ve got a discount running this week—you can join our community at 20 percent off the regular price:
–Sonny
 |
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’ Get Help 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.
 |