The YouTuber With $7M in Ticket Pre-Sales for His Movie. How He Did It
Markiplier on getting theaters on board for his indie ‘Iron Lung.’ Plus: Dhar Mann Studios’ CEO on the company’s microdrama deal with Fox
I cover creators. I scooped Substack’s new TV app, interviewed Wheelhouse CEO Brent Montgomery about his investment in microdramas, wrote about TikTok’s and BuzzFeed’s moves in vertical video and explored how Snapchat is minting new stars. Email me at natalie@theankler.com
Creators are finding their way onto every screen, and this week I talk to a hot new indie filmmaker: top YouTuber Markiplier, who’s conjured a unique recipe for box office success to the tune of $7 million in ticket pre-sales for his feature, Iron Lung. Plus, I’ve got an update on creators owning the microdrama story, including the one stat that convinced Dhar Mann Studios CEO Sean Atkins to get into the vertical video business with Fox Entertainment.
But before I dive into those stories, it’s been a rocky first few days for TikTok as an American-owned app.
Last Thursday, Bytedance announced it had finalized its deal with a group of non-Chinese investors — including Oracle, investment firms Silver Lake and MGX, and such individuals as Michael Dell — to create a new U.S. TikTok app. Adam Presser, a veteran of Warner Bros. who most recently led operations and trust and safety at TikTok, was named the new company’s CEO. It was the long-awaited resolution to a nearly six-year battle to keep TikTok operational in the U.S. But by this weekend, as videos circulated on other social media sites that showed federal agents shooting ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, users began to report that TikTok was censoring videos that criticized ICE. Some creators also complained that the platform’s payment tools appeared to have been shut down.
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TikTok responded on Monday with a post on X, of all platforms, indicating that a power outage at a U.S. data center had disrupted its services. It followed up again a few hours later, explaining that while the network had been recovered, “the outage caused a cascading systems failure” that could mean continued slow load times or time-out requests, including when posting new content; view counters that show 0 views on a video; and the disappearance of earnings.
As of Tuesday morning, the company said it had made “significant progress” in fixing the problems but that technical issues might continue to persist.
As TikTok’s ownership saga has played out over the past year, creators have largely continued to use the app like normal.
But this weekend was a stark reminder that small changes on these social media platforms can have a real impact on the content people see and creators’ ability to earn a livelihood, eroding trust over time. Market research firm Sensor Tower reports that the daily average of U.S. users deleting the TikTok app has surged 150 percent in the past five days. I’ll continue to report on how the change in ownership impacts creators who’ve built audiences (and businesses) there.
Now let’s dive into the rest of today’s newsletter, where I’ll break down for you:
Markiplier’s creator-to-cinema strategy that added up to $7 million in presales for a film that cost him a fraction of that
The Hollywood “never” rule he broke to make his trippy film
The creator ethos that drove his project forward
How he got thousands of theaters on board to screen the film, and even created a unique popcorn bucket promotion with Regal
Another creator-turned-filmmaker project and the scrappy Texas-based org that’s working to put out more
The shocking stat that drove Dhar Mann Studios to follow its audience into microdramas — and why Mann and Atkins chose Fox as a partner
The genre veteran they brought on to lead their partnership with Fox Entertainment the creative strategy to “double down” on top tropes