Zach Cregger did that without leveraging WKUK at all. Plenty of other indie film makers have.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.
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Truly inspiring what a person can accomplish with only a dream and also a few million dollars to blow.
I hope his newfound level of success means he'll get to cast some real actors and I won't be forced to look at his goofy ass face
I want to see his goofy ass and face.
BOOTY BUTT BOOTY BUTT BOOTY BUTT CHEEKS
Lmao
i mean, hes a famous youtuber already
I mean yeah, but compare it to the massive bloated funding of something like the latest Disney slop.
It's indie compared to that, and the dude clearly made this because he wanted to, not for some investor kpi. I know he's not like, a nobody suddenly making it big, but I'm just glad that a movie that somebody wanted to make and is actually a creative endeavor with some damn heart is getting this attention.
i dont disagree with anything you are saying. i just feel its a little unfair to talk about the film as if its equal to other indie films. most indie filmmakers are not already established youtuber superstars. and besides its based on a popular video game.
If anything, markiplier's popularity as a YouTuber plus his genre purity was a match made in heaven for this movie. This is essentially the indie film dream of getting an A list celebrity plus free marketing.
It kind of just reinforces the Hollywood system of sticking to successful actors for lead roles, while at the same risks collapsing that system by seeding the precedent of flipping famous influencers into actors for their built-in marketing.
If only all the unknown film makers who have spent their lives studying and making independent films that no one has heard of just made a YouTube channel 15 years ago to play video games instead. Sure, they wouldn't have spent thousands of hours honing their craft, but they'd have a captive audience to inflate force the success of anything they do, no matter how bad it is!
Indie films nowadays mean just about anything with a budget under 20M and not distributed by major studios.
Hell, A24 is still considered indie by many people.
You too can spend 15 years becoming a famous YouTuber and then spend a million dollars to make a movie set in one room and then spam your millions of followers daily to go see the movie to ensure it is successful even if it is about the same quality as a film student's second film
Maybe my bar for Hollywood has become very low. The enshittification so bad that even this feels like a small win. Sad, isn't it?
Hollywood has been pretty bad for years but there is always new talent getting attention. Eva Victor is a good recent example of someone with a ton of talent who worked hard and got the attention they deserve. Sorry Baby was only a little more expensive than Iron Lung and only made 3 million total but is actually a good movie and exists on the merits of the people who made it.
If Mark uses his 30 million bounty from this student level film to fund indie projects of people who actually know how to write and act instead of just appeasing his own desires to be a writer and actor, we could have over a dozen sorry baby quality films made instead of a dozen more iron lung quality movies
Unlimited genocide on all "content creators" that don't make videos for the love of making videos.
The movie was ok. It clearly had a lot of effort put into It. But my God Mark's acting is so ass and over the top sometimes.
The story isn't even explained all that well and It's too dark at moments so you can't see shit.
I watched it with friends, I'm glad I watched it, it was weird, I don't know anything about iron lung and it made me want to look up a full gameplay of the game and then go watch the theories and shit. That being said it's a 5-6/10
Bring back small bootstrapped indie films! My opinions of this movie aside, I hope it does inspire more small budget films.
This movie was terrible.
It's made by a well known YouTube celebrity. I'm not sure I'd call it indy, though I'm sure someone here will correct me and tell me how I'm wrong. idc.
indie means not made by one of the big studios, not that the producers/writers/directors etc aren't well known or that the film doesn't have significant funding
um akshually
Yeah but idgaf so
g'ed enough of a f to reply
So cool. How can I be more like you?