MEMO TO: Every Hollywood studio.
RE: A three-hour documentary that is currently embarrassing your spreadsheets.
On paper, it should have flopped. It’s a nearly three-hour documentary about a disgraced founder, with no franchise, no music, and no superhero on the poster. Instead, A24’s You Can See Everything turned into the box office story of the month. Here’s what happened, and what the numbers say you should take from it.
The Facts
The film, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, is a behind-the-scenes look at the private life of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. It opened with an estimated $15 million from just 855 theaters, according to TheWrap. That’s the biggest opening for any documentary since 2013’s One Direction: This Is Us. If you leave out concert films, it’s the biggest since Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004. Before opening weekend, it had been tracking at just $7 million to $8 million.
For comparison, the other big documentary this year, Amazon MGM’s Melania, opened to $7.1 million and cost $40 million, according to the AP’s reporting as carried by T2 Online. A24 reportedly spent under $10 million on the film’s production and marketing.
Lesson One: Per-Screen Power Beats Screen Count
On opening weekend, Street Fighter finished first with $31 million, but it needed 3,575 theaters to do it. You Can See Everything earned its $15 million from fewer than a quarter of those. Per BroBible’s breakdown, it averaged about $17,543 per theater, more than double Street Fighter‘s $8,671. A24 also reported more than 2,000 sold-out showings.
Lesson Two: Younger Audiences Will Show Up for Something Different
Here’s the part that should make executives sit up. According to the AP’s reporting, more than 70% of the opening weekend audience was under 35. Industry analysts have linked other recent hits, such as Backrooms and Obsession, to a Gen Z-driven audience too, as Click2Houston’s report notes.
That’s a good match for what we saw in UCLA’s latest research, which found that seeing a movie in a theater is still teens’ top choice for a free weekend. We broke that down in our piece on the Teens and Screens report.
Lesson Three: Buzz Is a Distribution Strategy
The film premiered as a surprise at the Telluride Film Festival, and it then built word of mouth through reviews, not ads. It holds a 99% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. Reviewers have been careful not to give much away, with critics suggesting that the less you know going in, the better. That secrecy is part of the pull. Many people want to see it before someone spoils it.
The mystery is also built into how it was made. According to TechCrunch, the filmmakers were given extensive access to Holmes and her family in the month before she went to jail, and the project was made in secret over three years.
Lesson Four: Don’t Underestimate a Name With a Following
Paul Dergarabedian, a box-office analyst quoted by the AP, said everyone underestimated the film because a three-hour documentary sounds like a hard sell. But he pointed to Fielder’s large social media following and to Holmes being a character people couldn’t make up. A recognizable person plus a strong hook can matter more than a recognizable franchise.
What the Numbers Don’t Prove
Let’s keep this in proportion. Documentary box office is still small next to blockbusters. The record for a documentary opening belongs to Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, which opened to $92.8 million in 2023. And a strong first weekend doesn’t guarantee a long run. Early projections for the second weekend, when the film expanded to roughly 2,600 theaters, ranged from about $15 million to $25 million depending on who you asked, and those were forecasts, not results. Box office estimates also get revised, so figures in different outlets vary a little.
It’s also a deliberately uncomfortable film, as TheWrap put it, so it isn’t for everyone, and plenty of people will choose horror for Halloween weekend instead.
The Takeaway
The lesson isn’t “make more documentaries.” It’s that audiences, especially younger ones, will leave the house for something that feels like an event, something they don’t want spoiled, and something they want to talk about. That’s a lot harder to manufacture than a sequel, and it’s why this one is a story.
For more on how audiences are changing what they watch, browse our Media Analysis section.
