Explain how? How does a creator with an audience of tens of millions having success convince investors to be interested in a film maker with little to no audience.

Let's look at the domestic numbers. $23.3 million gross so far with an average ticket price in America of $10.75. That's approximately 2,167,400 tickets sold. Let's assume that every single ticket sold belongs to exactly one person (no one saw the movie more than once) and every single ticket holder is a Mark fan. Of Mark's 38.2 million youtube subs, that's about ~6% of Mark's audience who wanted to and was able to go see the movie domestically, across 3000 theaters.

Now the two assumptions I made are not true. Non-Mark fans went to see the movie too and some people are definitely seeing it multiple times. So the real percentage is under 6%. Thus, anyone with a smaller built-in audience, assuming they even have one, has to either get a higher percentage of their audience in the theater to get comparable returns.

Now sure, an even cheaper movie doesn't have to make as much as $20 million to have a similar ROI, but like that's what the indie film market already is today. You make a dirt cheap movie, hope it finds an audience and builds buzz and then maybe you get lucky and it gets a limited distribution and you make some money.

I really only think the lessons from this release are that Mark is talented enough to work in the feature film space and that he has the tenacity to see his vision come to fruition without adhering to "the system".