How Filmmakers Are Breaking the Algorithmic and Hollywood Gatekeepers

From "Iron Lung" to "Secret Mall Apartment," stranger things are happening.

It is a very weird and wild time for the distribution of independent films. At the same time as filmmakers lament the state of the marketplace, the lack of Sundance acquisitions, and the stranglehold of the streaming industry, there are “opportunities,” as both new distribution companies and the “non-dependent” film community are telling me. And as much as I’m a cynic, I’m starting to think they’re right. Freaky things are happening.

Personally, I’m not a fan of the work of YouTube success story Mark Fischbach (aka Markiplier), but now that his low-budget sci-fi debut “Iron Lung” has earned over $38.3 million at the U.S. box office (working with independent booker Centurion Film Service), he is a force to be reckoned with. I’m not sure how I feel about a new wave of indie filmmakers emerging from the world of video-game walkthroughs as opposed to say, um, film school, but if people are going to overcome Hollywood at its own rigged game, more power to them. This is unprecedented.

Like Markiplier tapping his own 38.3 million subscriber fanbase to drive ticket sales (at the moment, there’s a crazily exact parallel between box office and subscribers), Angel Studios continues to harness its faith-based community to turn out audiences in theaters, as well. And like Markiplier, I don’t care much for the content, but Angel Studios so far has already delivered two films among the top 20 box-office performers of 2026: “David” (as in vs. Goliath), which was released in December and has since grossed over $80 million dollars(!), and this February’s release of a Hallmarky rom-com called “Solo Mio” (which has earned over $15 million).

Last summer, I wrote a post that suggested the left-wing could learn a lesson from Angel Studios and launch its own progressive alternative. And the way box-office sales and online viewing is continuing to fragment into various built-in niche audiences, I think the idea only makes more sense these days, especially as U.S. citizens grow angrier and more actively resistant to a U.S. government whose most recent and egregious ills include initiatives to actively poison the air we breathe, building $38 billion worth of warehouses to disappear people, and nominating an unapologetic white supremacist to the State Department. Come on, how much would you pay up to see a definitive film about progressive hero AOC or a blistering takedown of Trump’s corrupt presidency?

“Secret Mall Apartment” (2024-2025)

But until then, we’ll always have Netflix. Yes, despite all the evils that the far-right (too woke!), the left (too mediocratizing!), and everyone (Block the Merger!) lob at it, the media company has continued to produce a surprise indie success story every few months now, lifting up independent non-true-crime documentaries into its multimillion-viewer top-ten that no one saw coming.

First, there was “The Perfect Neighbor.” With its 42 million views in its first few weeks of release, the film became one of the most watched feature documentaries on Netflix ever. In writing about the phenomenon in December, I suggested “Netflix may have learned a valuable lesson in its late-stage capitalist phase: Quality is important.”

And so they have: More recently, there was “Secret Mall Apartment,” which actually world premiered two years ago at SXSW 2024, but broke into the vaunted ranks of Netflix’s Top Ten list just a few weeks ago.

Take a second to process that. The indie doc, about some activist-artists who inhabit a hidden alcove in a Rhode Island mall, had a good response at SXSW and even got some distribution offers, but none that were convincing enough for director Jeremy Workman to jump on them. So he self-distributes the film with the help of booker Michael Tuckman in March 2025, about a year after its festival premiere, and the film performs impressively, especially for an indie documentary release, earning about $1 million in sales, according to Workman (though official reported numbers are $850,000.)

And then, Music Box Films acquires TVOD rights, where it lands on TVOD platforms in September of last year, where it does well enough—earning in the low six figures—but not that great. “It’s hard to get people to pay $4.99 when they’re already paying for the subscriptions," says Workman, who at this point had given up on an SVOD deal.

But then, after all that, Netflix approaches the team around October 2025 to license it for early 2026. With little in the way of promotion—”the algorithm is their publicity,” notes Workman—the film lands in the Top Ten in North America in its first day. According to Netflix data, it is specifically ranked #10 globally (while only being available in North America) and #4 in the U.S. in its first week of release, 1/26/26 - 2/1/26, and watched by 2.9 million viewers, just above “K-Pop Demon Hunters. By now, Workman estimates that it has been garnered around 5 million views. And the film is even going back into theaters, relaunching at the Province Place Apple Cinemas today for another run while it’s also on TVOD and SVOD.

“The whole thing is so crazy,” says Workman, who is prepping his latest doc, “School for Defectors,” which is premiering at True/False in two weeks and which he expects may follow a similar self-distribution hustle.

This is not a reliable business model. But if another indie documentary breaks through in the next month or the month after that, it could be. I know there’s a lot of people advocating for quitting Netflix (and I understand, though I think Amazon and Paramount are the better target for political reasons), but maybe there is a chance of undermining the streamers’ power from within.

While Netflix certainly has the audience, there is potential hope to be found in other platforms, as well. While we have yet to see the results of Letterboxd’s Video Store, or the recently relaunched Sundance Now, we now have another indie-focused platform with Pijama Films, the video-on-demand service launched recently by acclaimed filmmaker Pablo Larrain.

So far, Pijama’s actual catalogue and site doesn’t engender too much confidence—there’s 22 films so far, two of which are directed by Larraín himself (“The Club,” “Post Mortem”) and two by Sebastian Silva (“Nasty Baby,” “Crystal Fairy”). But as another place where filmmakers can try to build their own audience (retaining 80% of the venue), it’s certainly the right kind of filmmaker-forward home that distributor-averse or distributor-less films could be attracted to, especially for international makers.

As Larraín told The Hollywood Reporter, “There is a cultural crisis, an enormous problem here, where if movies are not picked up by the very small, select group of buyers who still remain, then they are shelved and have no life,” he says. “And it’s absolutely insane, considering the number of movies this is happening to.”

It’s all true, of course. But it also seems to be increasingly the case that this unpredictable media market that we live in— where positive word-of-mouth can break the algorithm and fandom can crack the corporations—can yield some surprising and refreshingly independent results.