Here’s a thought experiment I haven’t been able to shake. If Iron Lung were the exact same movie in every single way, same script, same pacing, same execution, but produced inside the Hollywood studio system and starring an A-list actor instead of a beloved internet creator, I’m convinced it would’ve sunk and imploded at the box office. Hard. And the perfect comparison already exists in the form of Mercy.
Iron Lung is a lean, high-concept psychological horror story. A convicted criminal is forced to pilot a tiny, barely functional submarine through an endless ocean of blood on a dead moon, scavenging for resources after a cosmic disaster called the Quiet Rapture wipes out stars and habitable planets.
He’s isolated, claustrophobic, and possibly being hunted by something unseen in the depths. That’s an interesting concept. It’s eerie. It’s simple. It screams indie sci-fi horror. But, for me, it was not a good movie, and was very long, boring, and empty.
What actually pushed this movie to theatrical box office success wasn’t the execution, though. It was the audience.
Now let’s talk about Mercy. In that film, a detective is kidnapped and put on trial by an advanced AI judge that accuses him of murdering his wife. He has ninety minutes to prove his innocence or he’s executed on the spot. That’s it. That’s the hook.
It stars Chris Pratt, it’s slick, tightly paced, and built entirely around tension and ticking-clock pressure. It wasn’t great, but I enjoyed it. The movie crashed and burned. Audiences shrugged, and the internet barely cared. Yet here’s the uncomfortable truth: Mercy is a better movie than Iron Lung.
This is where hardcore fandom changes everything. Iron Lung didn’t succeed because general audiences fell in love with it. It succeeded because a massive, loyal fanbase showed up on opening weekend and treated it like an event.
That’s not an insult. That’s just reality. If Iron Lung starred an A-list actor and opened as a big studio sci-fi thriller, critics still would’ve torched it, audiences would’ve bounced, and the box office would’ve fallen off a cliff after day one.
The same boring slow pacing, the same minimal storytelling, the same emptiness would’ve been labeled indulgent instead of atmospheric.
Flip the scenario, though, and things get really interesting. If Mercy were an indie production, stripped of studio branding, starring a popular YouTuber or a non A-list actor with a built-in audience, would it have performed better at the box office and with audiences?
Probably! That kind of high-concept, contained thriller plays perfectly to social media-era attention spans and fandom-driven hype. With the right personality at the center, Mercy could’ve been framed as smart, tense, and underrated instead of disposable studio content.
What this really exposes is how uneven the playing field has become. Studio films live and die by mass appeal and opening-weekend perception. Indie films play by entirely different rules.
Iron Lung didn’t have to win over skeptics. It just had to activate its base, and it did that extremely well. That doesn’t make it a better movie, but it absolutely makes it a more successful one.
None of this is meant to tear down indie filmmakers or internet creators. If anything, it highlights how powerful that pipeline has become. Iron Lung, as bad of a movie as it was, proves you can bypass traditional gatekeepers and still dominate a theatrical weekend. That’s huge. This could change things in the movie business.
It also proves that if this exact movie had come out of a Hollywood studio with a recognizable movie star attached, we’d be talking about it as a high-profile failure instead of a surprise hit. Same movie. Same flaws. Totally different outcome.
That’s the wild part! In today’s box office landscape, who makes the movie matters just as much as the movie itself.
