Chicken Shop Date and Iron Lung: YouTube stars like Amelia Dimoldenberg make switch to the big screen

Two years ago, Amelia Dimoldenberg was on a date with Paul Mescal and she asked him if he would ever be in a rom-com.

She told him she was writing and directing a rom-com and that she was going to be the lead, and that she was looking for her male counterpart. She made him audition on the spot. In her signature playful negging style, she gave the impression he hadn’t made the cut.

The date, despite her insistence, wasn’t real. It was an instalment of her popular YouTube series, Chicken Shop Date, in which she interviews – and grills – celebrities at a random poultry eatery in London.

Her demeanour is deadpan and frequently sarcastic, and she’s known for throwing curlies at her guest. When Mescal said he used to play Gaelic football, she shot back, “Were you any good, obviously not, because you’re not doing it now, professionally”.

It’s all part of her brand. Chicken Shop Date has 3.34 million subscribers on YouTube but clips from the individual videos go viral on other platforms. Dimoldenberg can draw out some great reactions from famous people who are practised in not giving away too much.

Her guests have included the likes of Cher, Sabrina Carpenter, Ben Stiller, Idris Elba, Jennifer Lawrence and Elmo. She and Andrew Garfield’s flirtations took over the online discourse for a week. Billie Eilish complemented her on her breasts.

But Dimoldenberg is clearly not content with just being a celebrity whisperer. That rom-com she told Mescal about was probably just a bit, to get him to read a script with the line of dialogue, “Amelia, you look so beautiful today”, but now it’s also a thing that’s really happening.

Dimoldenberg has now been announced as the producer and star of an actual rom-com film in development at Orion Pictures, a subsidiary of Amazon MGM Studios.

She will play a straighty-one-eighty journalist whose life is knocked off its axis when a normal celebrity interview morphs into a romantic adventure.

The script is coming from Sarah Heyward, who has credits in the genre on series Nobody Wants This, Girls and Modern Love.

For Dimoldenberg fans, this is great news, but for the actors who have sometimes sat opposite her on those Chicken Shop Dates, it’s another case of the internet star coming for their jobs.

In all fairness to Dimoldenberg, she has done more than just host celebrity interviews on a YouTube show. Through her own company she produces the series too, which started as a project talking to artists from grime music, and which has now been running for over a decade.

She’s been the official red carpet reporter for the Oscars, a role she’ll reprise next month, and has brand deals with Olay, Bumble and Levi’s.

She has also presented TV shows, including a Channel 4 documentary, and has appeared across UK television on the likes of The Great Celebrity Bake Off, Taskmaster, The Big Narstie Show and Come Dine With Me.

That’s a list that looks like the regular TV circuit for any up-and-comer comedian, it’s just that Dimoldenberg made a name not in clubs and on stage but on YouTube.

That’s the difference, and it’s increasingly become a thing where social media personalities have leveraged their followings online to jump over to so-called traditional entertainment platforms such as films.

Two weekends ago, when a lot of people were watching the box office figures for the Melania documentary, there was an even more curious debut in that same frame. A movie called Iron Lung.

It was barely on the radar for most but it came in at number two at the North American box office, and opened at number one in Australia. So far, it’s grossed just under $US35 million, but with a budget of $US3 million, it’s well in the black.

The reason a lot of “regular” folk were thrown by its success is Iron Lung didn’t come out of a studio, it wasn’t even distributed by one. It was produced, written by, directed by, edited by and starred Mark Fischbach, better known by his online handle Markiplier.

Fischbach, 36, is a YouTuber, one of the earlier people to make a name online for what’s known as “let’s play” videos in which he plays games and comments on them. He’s been doing it for over a decade and has 38.3 million subscribers.

Iron Lung, a horror film, was adapted from a 2022 video game in which the player pilots a submarine through an ocean of blood on a moon. Fischbach had previously played the game on his channel.

He told Slate that he had struggled to get actual studios and distributors to take him seriously, and ended up self-financing the project and dealing directly with cinemas to get them to play the film.

The head film buyer for Alamo Drafthouse, a US indie cinema chain, Sarah Pitre, told The New York Times that Fischbach fans kept calling their local theatres demanding that Alamo screen his movie.

Pre-sales were strong, and it opened on 2500 screens in the US, but in a trend not dissimilar to that seen in superhero epics, the audience was frontloaded by fanboys and fangirls, and ticket sales dropped off significantly after the first week.

Still, it’s a huge success and Iron Lung came within a whisker of the American number one, which went to Send Help, starring Rachel McAdams and directed by one of the kings of horror, Sam Raimi.

Fischbach told Slate that Iron Lung’s success didn’t mean he wanted to be a mainstream celebrity. If anything, “I don’t want to be labelled a celebrity. I don’t want YouTubers to have to deal with any of the stuff that traditional Hollywood celebrities have to deal with”.

That may be so, but the screen industry is increasingly factoring in social media footprints into their greenlight and casting decisions.

Fischbach has probably already taken a bunch of meetings in Hollywood in the past two weeks with talent agents, production companies and studios.

Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner was one of the first actors to be frank about the influence of social media in 2017 when she revealed she was cast over a “far better actress” because she had more followers on social media. “It’s not right, but it is part of the movie industry now,” she had said at the time.

Maya Hawke revealed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast in 2023 that a director had told her, “They’re like, ‘just so you know, when I’m casting a movie with some producers, they hand me a sheet with the amount of collective followers I have to get of the cast that I cast, so if you delete your Instagram, and I lose those followers, understand that these are the kinds of people I need to cast around you’.”

Elle Fanning said she once lost out on a big franchise role and the feedback had been that she didn’t have enough Instagram followers at the time.

Addison Rae is now a Grammy-nominated singer but flash back a few years and she was best known for her being a dancing TikTok star. Which was enough to land her the lead role in a straight-to-Netflix movie remake of She’s All That called He’s All That.

It was a trifle of a film anyway, with the inexperienced-in-acting Rae clearly out of her depth and the movie was smashed with a 29 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But it was the number one movie on Netflix the week it was released.

Movie and TV actors have spent the past few years trying to make social media work for them, or at least stay on top of it. So, it’s likely particularly chilling to know that after all that work, studios are just going to cast homegrown YouTubers, TikTokers and Instagrammers anyway.

Not that the casting process has even been a meritocracy (because meritocracy doesn’t really exist, but that’s an argument for another day), but it’s just one more challenge in an industry already known for being brutal.

But we’ve also seen that talent is still ultimately a factor along with everything else. Rae found that her skillset was better suited as a singer and performer, not an actor, and now she’s killing it.

And no matter how many times pop stars including Madonna, Jessica Simpson and Mariah Carey were cast in films, they ended up going back to what they were best at.

Social media followings have certainly changed the metric though, and personalities such as Ms Rachel and Mr Beast don’t need another platform beyond YouTube, although they are nice to have all the same.

Ms Rachel’s Netflix program was the seventh-most watched show on the streaming service in first six months of 2025 when it made its debut. Mr Beast’s Prime Video series is onto its second season.

Actors thought they were just worrying about AI coming to replace real humans and artists with binary coding, studio consolidation and a lack of appetite for mid-budget movies. Now they have to watch over their shoulder for every YouTuber too.

With the Oscars broadcast set to move to YouTube from 2029, some of those newcomers will feel right at home.