YouTuber Markiplier Got Passes From Everyone in Hollywood — So, He Made a Hit His Way
In 2019, The Edge of Sleep, the latest offering from Mark Fischbach, known to his 37 million YouTube subscribers as Markiplier, was pitched to every major platform in Hollywood.
By then, Edge of Sleep was already a popular podcast. In fact, it quickly became the biggest genre narrative podcast of all time, with some 6 million downloads and counting. And for the television adaptation, Markiplier would be reprising his role as a night watchman who attempts to survive a mysterious global crisis where anyone who goes to sleep dies. The podcast’s creators, Jake Emanuel and Willie Block, were on board to write and run the TV version, and Longlegs producer Brian Kavanaugh Jones was attached to produce. There would be six episodes, made on a relative shoestring budget, served up to a rapt audience that Markiplier has cultivated for more than a decade with a channel primarily focused on Let’s Play videos.
But every viable outlet, from Netflix to Prime Video, passed.
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Daylight Media’s Ben Curtis, who’s represented Markiplier for eight years, wasn’t particularly surprised by the deluge of nos. As he tells it, Hollywood has never been willing to take his client seriously. The feedback? “’Oh, the YouTuber? No, thanks.’ Just totally dismissive,” he says via Zoom, insisting the entire reason that they did Edge of Sleep as a QCODE-produced podcast first was because they wanted something to be able to show skittish buyers when they ultimately shopped the TV adaptation. It was also the reason that Curtis, whose client roster over the years has included Rami Malek and Veep‘s Timothy Simons, urged Markiplier to do his second podcast, Distractible, an unscripted offering featuring him and a few buddies.
“I went to Mark three years ago and I said, ‘Hey, look, I’m not getting a lot of love and respect for you in the market, you should do a podcast because I know you can build one of the biggest podcasts in the world. And at that point, I think traditional Hollywood will say, “Oh wow, you just knocked out Joe Rogan from No. 1 on Spotify. Let’s pay attention,”’” says Curtis. “And then he did that, and people still didn’t care. It’s been seven years now of trying to get traditional Hollywood to pay attention.” (For the record, Spotify did, allegedly inking an eight-figure deal for Markiplier to host video episodes of Distractible and other podcasts.)
Markiplier is considerably more diplomatic. “I’m trying to show people [in Hollywood] that there is a different way, but at the same time, I do understand the mistrust of some creators,” he tells THR, acknowledging it was daunting to leap from his own videos to large-scale productions, with crews in the hundreds, even for him, who had scaled up gradually. “A YouTuber going into that is used to doing everything themself, so to learn to both collaborate with others and to let go a little and trust those who are experts in their department, it’s tough — especially when you have a distributor or some production company overseeing it or paying for it who wants to have input. It’s hard, and YouTubers can be very egotistical.” (Though he was simply an actor-for-hire and not a creative engine on Edge of Sleep, Markiplier still managed to butt heads with his producers, including the time he insisted upon licensing and editing in a different opening theme song, which he ultimately did with his own money.)
Most in Markiplier’s situation would have cut their losses and moved on. He hardly needs Hollywood, after all. But he didn’t generate nearly 17 billion video views by doing what others would do. “I have a desire to prove myself and prove that I can play at other people’s games just as well as they can,” he says. So, he and the team, which also includes Oddfellows’ Chris Ferguson and director Corey Adams, among others, decided to forgo the traditional route. Markiplier agreed to put up a portion of the financing and figure out a distribution strategy later. On Kavanaugh Jones’ recommendation, New Regency was recruited to come aboard as the studio and foot the remainder of the bill.
So, with COVID-19 still raging, the cast and crew decamped to Vancouver in the summer of 2021. The shoot lasted 25 days across 35 different locations, a triumph given the protocols in place at the time. According to New Regency’s chairman and CEO Yariv Milchan, it was a bet worth taking. “New Regency has a history of recognizing potential where others haven’t. Projects like The Revenant and Bohemian Rhapsody had been overlooked for years, yet we saw their value and brought them to life,” he says via email, adding: “With The Edge of Sleep, we saw a different potential in the unique combination of the largely untapped creativity from Markiplier and his dedicated fan base, along with the success of the original QCODE podcast. We were inspired by the challenge to create, together with Markiplier and QCODE, a series at the right budget while embracing innovative marketing approaches.” (Though everybody’s staying mum on said budget, it’s said to be a small fraction of a typical prestige drama.)
In 2023, with a nearly completed series, they took it out once more. This time, they did so with the first episode available for potential buyers to preview. Again, they were greeted with a succession of passes. Curtis, who’s also an executive producer on the project, isn’t even sure they bothered to open the link and sample it. “It was the same thing, ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ And that’s the point at which 99.9 percent of Hollywood quits, it’s over,” he says. “But we knew, with Mark, you have this special ingredient that people truly undervalue — and he’s a complete genius in marketing to his fans.”
He was confident that Markiplier could and would activate his audience. After all, he’d seen him do it many times before. A few years back, for instance, Markiplier had a YouTube channel called Unus Annus (“One Year” in Latin), where he posted a new video every day for a year, culminating in a 12-hour livestream on day 365 that ended with him deleting the entire channel. At one point, Curtis says there were 1.3 million concurrent viewers watching; and, in 24 hours, he says Markiplier managed to sell $19 million of merchandise. “And that was something that we couldn’t pay people to write about or talk about. No one cared,” says Curtis, who acknowledges he has a chip on his shoulder on his client’s behalf. “I mean, there’s less than 50 people in the entire world who could do that. We’re talking, like, Taylor Swift, Kardashian type stuff.”
Last month, Hollywood finally got its taste for Markiplier’s power. Over on YouTube, his platform of choice, he released a video announcing that Edge of Sleep would be coming out in a matter of weeks. That video, which didn’t even tell people where they could watch the series, racked up 3.5 million views. Then, on Oct. 18, the full season dropped on Amazon Prime Video via the Prime Video Direct content submission portal — or, technically, it was uploaded a few days before, for quality control. Almost instantly, and without any real promotion, it had broken into the Prime Video’s Top 10, where it remained, hovering around No. 6 or 7 through the weekend.
By Friday, a trailer dropped on both QCODE and New Regency’s social media, and Prime Video posted a clip on its social channels. A paid media buy launched that day, too. Later that evening, Markiplier called an “Emergency Meeting” of his fans, which turned into him hosting a three-hour livestream, during which he urged everyone to tune in and rate the series, as his goal now is to stay on the Top 10 TV chart for 30 days. In success, there will be a second season, and ideally distribution outside the U.S. According to the Amazon site, content providers to Prime Video Direct receive 50 percent of net revenue for titles that are available to buy or rent. By Sunday, 1.2 million had checked out the livestream video just to hear him field questions about the making of the series, his first foray into scripted and dramatic TV. (He talked, too, about Iron Lung, a bloody film that he acts in and directs, for which he’s currently seeking a theatrical distributor.)
The irony of its success over on Prime Video, one of many platforms that passed on Edge of Sleep when it came through the traditional channels, is not lost on Markiplier or his rep. “We definitely want to break glass,” Curtis says. “We want people to pay attention to the fact that this guy who was told no over and over again is so powerful that he can launch a TV show to great success on his own.”
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