Meet the millennial YouTuber whose horror movie is beating Melania Trump at the box office

Amazon MGM Studios reportedly spent $35 million marketing Melania: Twenty Days to History, a documentary following the first lady, with $20 million shelled out in U.S. marketing alone. Yet the self-made and self-financed film Iron Lung far surpassed Melania’s box office success this weekend with a bare-bones marketing scheme and a wealth of loyal subscribers.

YouTuber Mark Fischbach, better known as Markiplier, is the man behind Iron Lung, which raked in $18.19 million at the box office last weekend, more than six times the film’s reported $3 million budget. The film ran laps around big studios at the box office, earning more than double the $7 million Amazon brought in with Melania and coming in a close second to Disney’s Sam Raimi–directed horror-thriller Send Help, which earned $19.1 million domestically. 

Fischbach got his start on YouTube in 2012. The Hawaii native was then a 22-year-old studying medical engineering at the University of Cincinnati. As he has described public...