Over the weekend, something unexpected happened. Iron Lung, an independent film created by YouTuber Markiplier, gave Disney’s Send Help a run for its money. On Friday, Markiplier’s film took the lead as the number one movie in America and held that position right up to the very end. Send Help did take the number one slot by Sunday, but barely.

Challenging the old guard in theaters is not a new phenomenon. Recently, Angel Studios’ David also secured the number two spot, raking in $22 million during opening weekend. But this is the first time that an independent film produced by a single YouTuber with no studio assistance whatsoever has challenged the big dogs. And the fact that the Mouse has walked away from this weekend with egg on its face despite being number one gives me more vindictive pleasure than I can possibly describe. It’s just like that movie, Rocky. Sure, Apollo Creed won, but nobody cared. Rocky Balboa went the distance, and Iron Lung has done the same.

But this news is also timely. And as I learned about the neck-and-neck race between Iron Lung and Send Help, my mind immediately went to one of COSM’s recent sessions, where George Gilder and Ariel Emanuel discussed the future of entertainment. During that conversation, Emanuel explained how the amount of content is going to continue to increase while the cost of production is going to continue to decrease. He then envisioned a world where The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, might create his own television shows and basically have his own network.

I’m sure that some celebrities from the old way of doing things, celebrities like Mark Wahlberg, who’s directed movies in the past, will find this type of world ideal, but when I think about how Markiplier’s personal project has just given independent filmmakers the world over a glimmer of hope, an interesting question comes to mind: In a world where studios are no longer gatekeepers, how do they continue to exist? And if they exist at all, what incentive would a theater have to favor a studio’s movie over an independent creator’s film?

It’s no secret that movie theaters are dying. Covid has all but decimated them. During that period, people were compelled to stay home, and, thanks to the vast number of streaming services available, audiences found that they preferred to remain on their couches rather than brave the traffic and tolerate the sticky floors and torn seats of crowded theaters. And it turned out that a large screen alone wasn’t enough to draw those audiences back.

On top of that, movies nowadays are terrible, which is a subject by itself, but there’s a third point I’d like to bring up that’s much more relevant to this discussion. The A-list actor has become a thing of the past. Hollywood decided to focus on adapting franchises rather than promoting their actors, and because of this, most of the few A-list actors who remain have been grandfathered in. They are survivors of an old era.

This is a real problem because, in the past, the actors were what drew audiences, and this allowed studios to take chances on a wider variety of stories. Somebody could risk making a movie about someone warning a town about a volcano that’s going to blow, Dante’s Peak, because Pierce Brosnan was the star, and Pierce Brosnan was James Bond. Really, the movie may as well have been titled ‘James Bond vs. The Volcano’.

But then, Hollywood decided that it would be more efficient to let the stories, rather than the stars, promote the film. This sounded good in theory because they could pay the actors less, but then they made a horrible discovery: Audiences grew tired of the stories. Really, what has been called superhero fatigue can more accurately be described as franchise fatigue. This is a known phenomenon.

Westerns went through this, as did Biblical epics, romcoms, and so on. But the difference is that Hollywood is no longer promoting people like Tom Cruise the same way, and on top of that, YouTube has created celebrities that rival the Hollywood elite. Now Hollywood and the theaters that supported them are in a financial free fall. Then Iron Lung came out, and it looks like there might be a way to bring those audiences back to the theaters.

Markiplier said he would be content if 50 theaters accepted his film. But thanks to the persistence of his fans, Iron Lung is now in over 4,000 theaters internationally. And on top of that, the fans actually went to the theater and watched it, and they didn’t just watch the film; they promoted it, and their promotion was nearly enough to outpace the marketing power of a major studio. The movie made $21 million at the box office. Send Help made $28.1 million.

But here’s where things get interesting. Iron Lung cost less than $3 million to make and relied heavily on organic reach. Send Help cost $40 million to make, and while it’s more difficult to find their marketing budget, it’s a safe bet that the number adds a great deal more to that total. A lot will depend on the drop-off in sales during the next few weeks, but since Iron Lung has made such a splash, I doubt that the drop-off will be too much, and Markiplier has probably already made his money back anyway. It remains to be seen whether or not Send Help will make a profit at all. It’s on pace to do so, but time will tell.

Granted, Markiplier is one of the largest channels on YouTube. He was among the first to “make it” on that platform. But if Ariel Emanuel is right, and AI is about to significantly drop the cost of media production, who’s to say that smaller channels won’t be able to enter the world of filmmaking as well?

If that happens, what kind of deals can those creators make with theaters? I imagine those theaters will fare quite a bit better than they would at the hands of a major studio. If a larger share in the ticket sales wasn’t incentive enough, the increased competition might motivate the studios to make better deals with theaters as well. Plus, Ariel Emanuel made an interesting point during his discussion with George Gilder: Streamers will create more content since AI will continue making the cost of production cheaper.

So, imagine YouTubers making, not just a film, but a large number of films for their fans. The theater might have a smaller number of people in attendance—of course it’s hard to imagine the numbers being much smaller than they are now—but there will be a larger number of films available. The theaters, instead of having the same number of movies available for months, could have a higher rotation of movies that will only be available for a few weeks before the next creative work from a YouTuber comes in. That means it’s possible to imagine customers not only coming in once every eight weeks, but once every three or four. Who knows? The theaters might just be able to keep themselves from going the way of vaudeville.

I don’t think the age of actors will ever return, but I suspect that the time of the creators is on the horizon, and, while I don’t buy all this singularity nonsense, I do think AI can provide a way for smaller creators to rival studios, if not replace them. AI gives the creators the ability to make vast fantasy landscapes in a matter of seconds instead of requiring weeks of digital creative work to produce one shot.

It also gives them the ability to create digital extras, so they don’t have to hire a large number of actors. It removes the need for a large number of graphic designers and gives the ability to produce soundtracks in a fraction of the time. All the basic elements needed for creating a film are already in circulation, and if AI continues to advance, the quality of these independent films will improve alongside it.

And the best part for theaters is that Markiplier has shown his fans will flock to their favorite creators’ productions in the same way fans would flock to theaters to see their favorite stars. Imagine a world where the theaters are presenting the productions of local talent, not just the generic films produced by studios whose creativity is limited to general audiences only. This time of the creators might be inevitable, and whether or not theaters survive will depend on if they adapt to the change or fight it. George Gilder has said technology will lead to superabundance. I think he’s right.