If your streaming service was the exclusive home to a TV series starring one of YouTube‘s longtime stars, wouldn’t you be promoting the heck out of it?
We think so, but Amazon apparently doesn’t agree. It picked up rights to The Edge of Sleep, a long-awaited, six-episode, live-action adaptation of Markiplier‘s scripted podcast starring the man himself, and so far has been pretty weird about advertising it.
Markiplier (aka Mark Fischbach) announced The Edge of Sleep would become a TV show way back in 2021. He would star and executive produce, with The Revenant producer New Regency serving as the project’s production studio and independent financier. In March 2023, Fischbach switched talent reps, signing with UTA, and the duo planned to take the then-fully-shot Edge of Sleep show out and shop it around to potential distribution outlets.
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Well, they found one…but couldn’t say what it was. And that hush-hush continued for months: just a couple weeks ago, on Sept. 30, Fischbach returned from a monthlong YouTube break to post The Plan, a video about how he needed fans to help support The Edge of Sleep when it came out.
But he couldn’t say where they’d need to go to support it. Apparently, “for legal reasons,” he said, he couldn’t disclose which distributor had picked it up.
“Where? You don’t get to know. Actually, you probably would like to know but I can’t tell you for some reason,” he said. “We’re legally not allowed to say where it is coming out until the day it comes out.”
Fans in the comments frothed with anticipation, but some wondered what the deal was. What distributor wouldn’t want them to know where it was going to air? Their questions were answered on Oct. 15, when Amazon dropped all six episodes of The Edge of Sleep a full three days before its stated release date of Oct. 18, with no announcement and no promotion. Once it dropped, Fischbach quickly uploaded a followup video, still asking fans to tune in and help bump The Edge of Sleep with early viewership.
“It’s available right now […] on Prime Video. I couldn’t say that before, for reasons I still do not fully understand,” he said. “But it’s out now, so I’m not going to wait any longer, because no one else is waiting for this. Or, I mean, everyone else is waiting for this, because all the marketing is still set to go up on the 18th, and it is currently the 15th, which means we have a few days where we are on our own.”
While we here at Tubefilter don’t expect Amazon to put on the kind of fanfare for a miniseries as it does for shows like The Rings of Power or the Russo brothers’ very expensive failure Citadel, it is strange that Amazon is giving this kind of handling to a show from a YouTuber with 37 million subscribers, 150 million views a month, a history of producing acting projects in partnership with YouTube, and a future lead role in the adaptation of hit indie horror game Iron Lung that’s slated to go to theaters. We know Amazon is willing to promote creator-fronted projects; it announced MrBeast’s now-contentious Beast Games not long after the $100 million deal’s ink was dried.
But despite Amazon’s handling, The Edge of Sleep surged to Prime’s #9 most-watched property shortly after Fischbach’s second video. We’ve talked a lot lately about the power of content creators’ fandoms, and that surge is an obvious example. Fischbach knows that power, too: he’s relied on his fans this way before.
Back in 2022, he said he would start a “tasteful” OnlyFans if viewers would get his two podcasts, Distractible and Go! My Favorite Sports Team, trending on Spotify and Apple charts, plus watched his documentary about his family, Markiplier from North Korea. They ended up meeting all three conditions, and when Fischbach started his official OnlyFans account (with proceeds going to charity) in December 2022, the sheer deluge of enthusiastic signups crashed the site.
Now that it’s Oct. 18, The Edge of Sleep‘s original release date, we’ll see if the marketing Fischbach mentioned comes from Amazon, or if the ecommerce giant will stay mum on his miniseries.
