The world has seen a ton of video game adaptations in the last 10 years, however a lot of them followed popular games and series from big-budget studios. In contrast, in 2026 we have already seen two indie game movie adaptations, Iron Lung and The Mortuary Assistant, with a third, Exit 8, being released in the United States in a few months.
In 2022, David Szymanski released a new video game to Steam, priced at $7.99, titled “Iron Lung,” and soon after Mark Fischbach, commonly known online as the youtuber Markiplier, played the game on his channel. The original YouTube video gained 13 million views, with a second video titled “Iron Lung: THE LORE UPDATE” arriving on July 13, 2022.
Markiplier released two trailers for Iron Lung on his YouTube channel. The first was a teaser that released on Apr. 21 2023 and the second was the official trailer on Oct. 14 2023, together gaining a combined 18 million views.
As Markiplier kept releasing content about updates about the movie, fans began to grow impatient, as the first trailer is now over 2 years old. Though the wait was long, fans were very excited to see on Dec. 5 2025, Markiplier released the final trailer.
Iron Lung released on Jan. 30 2026, with its showing originally only being in 50 theaters. However, after selling out many of those showings, the number of theaters ended up going up to more than 3,000 internationally. These numbers are extraordinary considering that Markiplier was the writer, director, producer, and main actor, and his team did all of the production and distribution alone with no help from big production companies. Though the movie took a long time to make, it ended up being No. 1 at the box office on Jan. 29 to Jan. 31, beating the newest Disney movie Send Help.
Though this movie topped the charts for around 3 days, it was removed from the charts completely due to a glitch, and it has not returned to its spot as No. 2.
The Iron Lung game follows an unnamed convict who is on a mission to earn his freedom after the Quiet Rapture, an event that happened in the future where all habitable planets and stars disappeared from existence, leaving only those that were on space stations alive. In the game we learn that there are four remaining moons in the universe that contain blood oceans. The convict is welded into a submarine on the moon AT-5 to explore its depths as a part of the Conviction Realization program.
In the game you discover the notes of previous pilots of the Iron Lung, and learn more about the monster that is in the depths of AT-5’s blood ocean, and Markiplier expanded on this lore in a very nice way. The movie sticks to the premise and lore of the original game, but adds more depth, like the addition of a name, backstory, and heartbreaking display of emotions from the convict.
Some key moments I really enjoyed that were added to the lore is the addition of a microphone that connects the convict to the people on the surface, as well as the addition of more information about the camera being an x-ray, leading viewers to realize that the things on the bottom of the ocean aren’t just bones like originally believed, they could have been living creatures the whole time.
Though the second indie game adaptation to release this year, The Mortuary Assistant, received a full playthrough by Markiplier in the same year as Iron Lung, its movie did not have as much success.
Markiplier released five videos playing the demo and full version of The Mortuary Assistant, amassing around 32 million views in total. The official announcement for this film came on Sept. 22, 2022, just six months before Markiplier announced he was going to be working on turning Iron lung into a film. The original playthrough for this game was extremely entertaining, we got to see someone work out the game with no help from anyone on what to do. However, in his first run of the game, he missed a lot of small details and lore, but somehow survived, which made me want to watch his other episodes even more.
The Mortuary Assistant official trailer was posted to the IGN Movie Trailers YouTube channel on Jan. 16, 2026, and had around 875,000 views. This is more than 200,000 less than the original games trailer that came out in 2022 for the announcement of the full game.
The budget of The Mortuary Assistant is unknown at this point, but the movie had a domestic grossing of $259,338 in its opening weekend. The film was distributed by Shudder, Epic Pictures and Seismic Releasing, but only released in around 200 theaters in the United States.
The Mortuary Assistant game follows your player-character, a young girl named Rebecca, who has an internship at the River Fields Mortuary. On one of your shifts your boss calls you in late at night to do some embalming and cremations, this is when you discover that River Fields is home to a lot more than just dead bodies. Demonic presences haunt you until you are able to discover the demon’s real name and perform a binding ceremony. Though there are seven different endings to the original game, many prefer the “closure” ending as the good ending; this is when Rebecca identifies the demon correctly, successfully burns it, and is able to confront her trauma to survive the whole night.
I think that the film did a great job including a few different endings in the film, for example, she burns the incorrect body the first time, and at the end of the film she does get what would be the closure ending. However for people that have not played the game I feel like the ending might not be as satisfactory, in the end she accepts that she needs to stop running from her problems and goes back into River Fields to keep fighting these forces with her boss.
Based on numbers alone, it seems like Markiplier did a much better job with his film than than director Jeremiah Kipp did with Mortuary Assistant, and I think this is true. Even without a distribution team, Markiplier did a great job self advertising on his very popular YouTube channel. On the other hand, I only ever saw one advertisement for the Mortuary Assistant, and it was during the previews at AMC when I watched Iron Lung.
Though these films both have great and successful game material, I think Markiplier had it a lot easier when adapting Iron lung. He took a game that takes on average around an hour to play and made it into a two hour movie, whereas Jeremiah Kipp had over 20 hours of gameplay, multiple endings and storylines to work with, and he compressed it into a one and a half hour movie.
Overall the production and execution of Iron Lung was a lot better than that of The Mortuary Assistant, though due to possible differences in budget and overall fanbase, this could be an unfair comparison. Even though Iron Lung is an indie film, it still came from one of the most popular youtubers in the United States, who already had fans ready for the movie for years before its release.
