“You Can See Everything,” a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, drew an estimated $15 million in its opening weekend, the second-largest debut ever for a documentary film, according to Sunday estimates. The nearly three-hour film is playing in only 855 theaters this weekend, compared with 3,575 for “Street Fighter,” the weekend’s top movie. Despite the smaller footprint, it recorded 2,000 sellout screenings, and reviews are overwhelmingly positive: it holds a score of 99% on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.
The film was first shown last month at a secretive screening at the Telluride Film Festival. It was co-directed by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, the creator of “The Rehearsal.” The filmmakers were given extensive access to Holmes and her family in the month before she went to jail, and Fielder’s involvement drew additional attention to the project.
Holmes’ story has been covered before in books, podcasts, scripted miniseries and other documentaries. She founded the blood-testing startup Theranos, attracted support from many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, and was ultimately sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors.
Demand for tickets has been high. A TechCrunch reporter noted spending much of the previous day trying to find a screening in Manhattan for that night and locating exactly one with seats available outside the front row. TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling saw the film on Thursday and wrote that the enigmatic Holmes finally seems to have met her match in Fielder, a deadpan comedian she described as arguably just as strange and mysterious. Fielder’s month with Holmes is apparently just the beginning of what Silberling described as an increasingly surreal, metatextual odyssey.
The attention around “You Can See Everything” may be making it harder for other tech-centric films to break through. Aaron Sorkin’s “Social Network” follow-up, “The Social Reckoning,” opened to a disappointing $5.5 million last weekend and has already fallen entirely out of the top 10. Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary “Musk” made only $306,702 this weekend, hampered perhaps by resistance from social platforms and its four-hour runtime.
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