"You Can See Everything," A24's documentary following Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes through her final days before reporting to federal prison, has become one of the year's most improbable box-office stories, holding strong through its third weekend despite a nearly three-hour runtime and a subject most audiences assumed they already knew everything about.
Directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim spent three years filming, with Fielder embedded for a month with Holmes's family, capturing her two young children and partner Billy Evans in the stretch before she surrendered to begin her sentence. The film was made for under $7 million and marketed for under $10 million — a fraction of a typical theatrical release, let alone one that has outperformed most of this fall's studio pictures.
A documentary behaving like a blockbuster
Its opening weekend in mid-October brought in $15 million from just 855 screens, with more than 2,000 sellout screenings — the biggest documentary opening in roughly 20 years, trailing only "Fahrenheit 9/11"'s $24 million debut in 2004, and the largest opening on fewer than 1,000 screens since "Borat" in 2006. The film expanded to 2,655 locations in its second weekend, adding $19.5 million for a running total of $45.1 million, finishing second only to DC's "Clayface." Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 99 percent, matched by a 99 on Metacritic, and PostTrak found 91 percent of opening-weekend audiences gave it a "definite recommend" — a crowd that skewed heavily young, with more than 70 percent of early ticket-buyers under 35.
Everybody underestimated the movie, because on paper this is like, wait, a three-hour documentary? [But Holmes is] a character that you couldn't even make up.
Paul Dergarabedian, head of domestic box office, Comscore
What's next
Box-office trackers had forecast the third weekend, which closed Sunday, to bring in another $12 million to $17 million, though final numbers were not yet available at publication; distributors typically report weekend totals Monday afternoon. Whatever the final figure, the film's run has already reset industry assumptions about how large an audience a long-form documentary about a well-covered news story can draw into theaters, at a time when streaming has pulled most documentary viewing off the big screen entirely. A24 has not announced a streaming date, suggesting the studio intends to keep the film in theaters as long as audiences keep showing up.
