Markiplier, born Mark Fischbach, spent a decade screaming at animatronics on YouTube and then wrote, directed, financed and starred in a horror film. Iron Lung opened on January 30, 2026, and The Numbers tracked it to $51.2 million worldwide on a $3 million budget.1
That one release put a Let's Player on lists built for directors and studios. Halloween is the season his old horror videos come back around, so here he is on twelve rankings: YouTubers, podcasts, low-budget horror, video game adaptations and the most famous people from Cincinnati.
Markiplier keeps landing on lists YouTubers rarely reach, box office and podcast charts among them, and each one leads back to one 2014 night shift at Freddy's.
Markiplier vs MrBeast: the greatest YouTubers of all time
The broadest ranking here asks who the greatest YouTuber is, and Markiplier shares it with MrBeast, PewDiePie, Jacksepticeye, Casey Neistat and Jenna Marbles.
His case is longevity. He registered the Markiplier channel in March 2012, reached 10 million subscribers in October 2015 and stood near 38.8 million in August 2026.2 In 2022 Forbes listed him as the third-highest-paid creator on the platform. Five years earlier, the Golden Joystick Awards named him best streamer or broadcaster of 2017.
MrBeast carries the strongest counter-case. He runs YouTube's biggest channel and turned it into Beast Games, a show on Amazon Prime Video.
Most names on this list built one format and stayed in it. Markiplier ran Let's Plays, sketch series, interactive films and a podcast, and the voter has to decide whether range beats reach.
The Let's Play generation: twenty gaming channels
Gaming YouTube grew out of people recording themselves playing, and this ranking of the best gaming YouTubers covers twenty of them, including PewDiePie, Technoblade, Dream, DanTDM and the Angry Video Game Nerd.
Markiplier's first series was a playthrough of Amnesia: The Dark Descent in 2012. He dropped out of a biomedical engineering degree at the University of Cincinnati to keep making them.2
PewDiePie came up on the same game and the same kind of reaction video, and critics have compared the two ever since.
The field around them is wide. Technoblade and Dream built careers on Minecraft, MatPat on lore theories, videogamedunkey on editing, and Markiplier has to hold his place against all of those formats.
Five Nights at Freddy's and the horror channel Guinness counted
Horror is the narrower question, and here Markiplier has a record behind him. Guinness World Records listed his channel as the most-viewed for horror video games, with 8,970,596,758 views as of February 28, 2018.3
Five Nights at Freddy's did most of that work. He has played every entry in the series for more than a decade.
CoryxKenshin is the strongest rival on the list, with a comedy-horror style and a samurai persona. 8-Bit Ryan and Dawko built their channels on the same animatronics, and MatPat turned the game's lore into a Game Theory staple.
The overrated list: Logan Paul, MrBeast and Markiplier
Every big audience produces a backlash, and this ranking collects the YouTubers people call overrated: Logan Paul, Jake Paul, MrBeast, David Dobrik, James Charles and Markiplier among them.
The case against Markiplier is the volume. Loud reactions and big thumbnails are the house style of the Let's Play, and he set much of it.
His defenders point to what the audience does when he asks. A 2018 calendar he sold raised more than $490,000 for the Cancer Research Institute.2
Logan Paul is the sharpest contrast on the list: a vlogger who became a WWE wrestler, with an audience that splits harder than Markiplier's ever has.
A Heist with Markiplier: a YouTube Original with 31 endings
The best TV show made by YouTubers is a mixed field: Beast Games, Ms. Rachel, Bo Burnham's Inside, RWBY and Red vs. Blue.
A Heist with Markiplier arrived in October 2019 as an interactive YouTube Original. Viewers chose the next scene and could reach 31 different endings. It won the 2020 Streamy Award for scripted series, and the 2022 follow-up, In Space with Markiplier, earned a Children's and Family Emmy nomination.2
Red vs. Blue is a fitting opponent. Rooster Teeth made that series and co-produced the Heist.
H3 Podcast vs Distractible: three friends and no agenda
Podcasts hosted by YouTubers form a crowded field: the H3 Podcast, Logan Paul's Impaulsive, Views, Chuckle Sandwich, Trash Taste and Emma Chamberlain's Anything Goes.
Distractible is Markiplier's entry. He launched it in May 2021 with Bob Muyskens and Wade Barnes as a comedy show that rarely stays on its topic, and it reached No. 1 on both Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
The H3 Podcast follows the opposite model: news-driven and built around Ethan Klein's commentary on the internet itself.
Iron Lung vs Project Hail Mary: a small film in a big year
The best movie of 2026 so far is a list of studio weight. Project Hail Mary, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, Michael and Scream 7 all sit on it.
Iron Lung was made on another scale entirely. Markiplier adapted David Szymanski's 2022 indie game about a convict sent to explore an ocean of blood in a tiny submarine, played the lead and paid for it himself.
The film is rated R and was distributed by Markiplier Studios, his own label. That is the context for any comparison with a Ryan Gosling space epic.
Two other films on the same list, Backrooms and Obsession, also came from YouTubers.
Obsession, Backrooms, Iron Lung: YouTubers at the box office
Movies directed by YouTubers were a curiosity until 2026. Bloomberg Law reported that Backrooms, Kane Parsons' A24 feature built on his found-footage series, opened to $81.4 million in the US and Canada on a reported $10 million budget, the third box-office hit of the year from filmmakers who started on YouTube.4
Iron Lung opened that run in January. Curry Barker's Obsession followed in May.
The older entries set the standard. Danny and Michael Philippou, the twins behind the RackaRacka channel, made Talk to Me and Bring Her Back. Bo Burnham directed Eighth Grade, and David F. Sandberg turned an online short into Lights Out.
Chris Stuckmann's Shelby Oaks rounds out the field. Stuckmann spent years reviewing films on YouTube before raising the money for his own on Kickstarter, and Neon released it in cinemas in 2025. Its plot follows a woman searching for her sister, a paranormal investigator who vanished while filming for her channel, so the YouTube origin is in the story as well as the credits.
Iron Lung vs The Super Mario Bros. Movie: games on the big screen
Video game adaptations used to be a punchline, and this ranking shows how far they have come: The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Sonic the Hedgehog, Detective Pikachu, Mortal Kombat and Uncharted.
Iron Lung is the strangest entry. It comes from a short indie game by a solo developer, adapted by a man who became famous for playing games like it on camera.
Five Nights at Freddy's, the series that made his channel, is absent from this list. Markiplier was asked to appear in the 2023 film and could not, because the shoot clashed with Iron Lung.
Mario holds the opposite end: a Nintendo mascot, an animation studio and a franchise four decades old.
Low-budget horror since The Blair Witch Project
Low-budget horror has a long hit list, from Night of the Living Dead in 1968 to Halloween, The Evil Dead, The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and Saw.
Iron Lung earned about seventeen times its cost, enough to enter that company.
Obsession made a far bigger jump. Fangoria reported $403 million worldwide for a film made for less than $1 million, after Focus Features bought it for $14 million at a festival.5
The Blair Witch Project still defines the category: three actors, a forest and a marketing campaign that convinced people the footage was real.
Markiplier vs Steven Spielberg: Cincinnati's famous names
Markiplier was born in Honolulu in 1989, but he grew up in Cincinnati, graduated from Milford High School in 2007 and started his channel there.2
The city's most famous people make a crowded list for him, next to Steven Spielberg, Sarah Jessica Parker, Doris Day, Roy Rogers, Pete Rose and Ted Turner.
Spielberg, born in Cincinnati in 1946, faces him in the frame, and the pairing has a point now that Markiplier has directed a film too.
Those names span a century of fame. Theda Bara was a silent-film star, Bootsy Collins played bass for James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic, and Barry Larkin spent his whole Hall of Fame career with the Reds.
Five Nights at Freddy's vs Unus Annus: Markiplier's own work
The last ranking makes Markiplier the whole question and asks which of his series is best.
Five Nights at Freddy's is the obvious favourite. His first video of the game went up on August 13, 2014 and had passed 127 million views by February 2026.2
Unus Annus is the strangest entry. He and Ethan Nestor posted one video a day from November 15, 2019, then deleted the channel exactly a year later, after a final livestream that peaked above 1.5 million concurrent viewers.
The Edge of Sleep has the most unusual route. It began in 2019 as an audio drama about a night watchman who wakes to find people around the world dying in their sleep, and returned in 2024 as a television series that reached Prime Video's Top 10.
The remaining options cover the Amnesia playthrough that started the channel, Who Killed Markiplier?, Markiplier Makes, Distractible, the two interactive specials and Iron Lung.
From Freddy's office to a cinema screen
Twelve lists cover a Let's Player, a podcaster, a TV producer, a director and a Cincinnati kid, and Markiplier is the same person on all of them. The animatronic video from 2014 paid for the audience that later paid for the submarine.
Each list settles its order through two cards at a time, like the screens above. If you have a creator of your own who crosses this many categories, line their chapters up as options and let the matchups sort out which one lasts.
More rankings, more angles
- Is MrBeast the Biggest YouTuber? 500 Million Subscribers, 12 Lists — game-show hosts, snack brands and North Carolina
- Is Mark Rober the Best Science YouTuber? Where He Lands on 14 Lists — a NASA engineer turned glitter-bomb inventor
- YouTube: Best Streaming Service or Best Social Network? 16 Lists — the platform itself, from smart TVs to comment sections
Sources
- The Numbers — Iron Lung (2026) box office, budget, release date and rating: the-numbers.com (checked 2026-10-17)
- Wikipedia — Markiplier: channel history, subscriber counts, Forbes listing, Unus Annus, A Heist with Markiplier, Distractible, awards, Cincinnati upbringing: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-10-17)
- Guinness World Records — most viewed YouTube channel for horror videogames: guinnessworldrecords.com (checked 2026-10-17)
- Bloomberg Law — Backrooms opening weekend and budget: news.bloomberglaw.com (checked 2026-10-17)
- Fangoria — Obsession passes $400 million worldwide: fangoria.com (checked 2026-10-17)