Iron Lung made $50M. Should be easy for Markiplier to put it up for sale on YouTube, right? Wrong.

When Markiplier‘s self-made (and self-funded) Iron Lung adaptation cranked $50+ million in theaters, it was easy to assume he’d eventually put a digital version of the movie up for sale on YouTube. After all, he’s been on the platform for 14 years, has nearly 40 million subscribers, and is one of the most recognizable faces in our industry. He also owns the rights to the movie, so he can put it wherever he wants. Meanwhile YouTube has thousands of films and TV shows for rent and sale, so the infrastructure is there.

Or is it?

Turns out, things are not as simple as they seem.

“As a YouTuber, [I figured] a really convenient thing to do is, I could put Iron Lung up on YouTube Movies for sale,” Markiplier (aka Mark Fischbach) told viewers in an April 20 livestream. “But the problem is, you can’t just take a video and put it up on YouTube and sell it as a movie. You’d think it would work that way, I thought it worked that way because I’m a YouTuber and I’m like, ‘I do that every day. I just put it up and release it.’ That’s not how it works.”

Once Fischbach realized how complicated the process was, he got in contact with Fede Goldenberg, YouTube’s Head of TV & Film Partnerships–because not only did he want to get Iron Lung live on YouTube, he wanted to find a way to make things easier for other indie filmmakers, too.

“The problem is, there are barriers for people to have entry [to sell on YouTube],” Fischbach explained. “There’s a thing called an aggregator that you usually have to go through, or a studio if you’re big enough for that. And I said [to Goldenberg], I have the success of this movie, it’s kind of like a moment here. Maybe we could use it, capitalize on it, and you could make me an aggregator.”

Becoming an official approved aggregator meant Fischbach “would be able to not only bring my movie onto the platform for sale, [but] if there are other people that have movies that I see and I think this is worth it, this is good, I can bring it onto the platform, and then people don’t have to go through the red tape, right?” he explained. “That was the goal. And I [told YouTube], ‘This seems like something that would be worth it.'”

YouTube agreed.

It and Fischbach are still in final stages of negotiations, having undergone what Fischbach describes as an “arduous legal process” where he was “so agreeable on everything.”

“I said what I’ll do is, I’ll release [Iron Lung] exclusively on YouTube if you’ll let me do this,” he said.

That means YouTube will be the sole digital destination where viewers will be able to buy Iron Lung. These are different and more limiting circumstances than major Hollywood studios experience; they normally offer their movies and TV shows for sale across numerous platforms, even as streaming services fight for exclusive catalog rights.

For example, Project Hail Mary will probably stream exclusively on Prime Video when it releases to home video, since it was produced by Amazon MGM Studios, but it’ll go up for sale across platforms like YouTube, Apple TV, and Fandango, because the wider the release, the more potential money a studio can make.

But for Fischbach, this sacrifice is worth it if he can both release Iron Lung online and be an advocate aggregator.

“Hopefully, hopefully down the road, what this means is–look, I can incorporate some change right now,” Fischbach said. “But down the road I would like to fight to build a system where anybody could do it. I feel like, down the road, if more people are making independent films, there should be a system where people are able to just [put their movies for sale on YouTube] almost as easily as making YouTube videos and uploading them.

“Now I can have a foot in the door that I can affect change, and if I can use this opportunity where Iron Lung had success to make it easier for more people after me to get their product not only made, but distributed and in front of people for people to see and possibly even make money off it, that’s the goal here,” he said.

He’s also thinking bigger: another idea he had involves content creators being able to post trailers for their own films or reviews for other creators’ films, then link directly to those movies for sale on YouTube’s platform. Creators could get a cut if their viewers decided to rent and/or buy the films.

All of this is part of a future where Fischbach sees himself “taking a chainsaw to the industry and I’m just trying to hack it apart because I hate all the red tape.”

Iron Lung doesn’t yet have a confirmed release date, but Fischbach said when it does come out, it’ll be in 4K HDR. Maybe then viewers will be able to find those secrets…