“You Can See Everything” is already making a splash at the box office, with a $15 million opening weekend (based on Sunday estimates). This is the second largest opening weekend ever for a documentary film.
The nearly three-hour film – first revealed last month during a secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival — is only showing in 855 theaters this weekend. (By contrast, the weekend’s No. 1 movie, “Street Fighter,” is showing in 3,575 theaters.) But it has had 2,000 sold-out screenings, and the reviews are overwhelmingly positive; “You Can See Everything” currently has a score of 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.
The story of the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes — founder of blood-testing startup Theranos, attracting support from many Silicon Valley big names, then ultimately sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors — has been told before in books, podcasts, TV shows and other documentaries.
But the “You Can See Everything” filmmakers had extensive access to Holmes and his family in the month before his incarceration, and the involvement of “The Rehearsal” creator Nathan Fielder — who co-directed the film with Lance Oppenheim — made it even more intriguing.
Although I haven’t seen the film myself, I can at least attest to the difficulty of finding tickets in Manhattan: I spent a good part of yesterday trying to find a showing for tonight, and found exactly one with seats available that weren’t in the front row. (Yes, of course, I’m going.)
Amanda Silberling of TechCrunch was already able to see it on Thursday. She wrote that the enigmatic Holmes seems at last to have met his match in Fielder, a deadpan comedian who is arguably as strange and mysterious as she is. Fielder’s month with Holmes is apparently just the beginning of what feels like an increasingly surreal metatextual odyssey.
The discussion around “You Can See Everything” could make it harder for other tech-centric films to break through. Aaron Sorkin’s “Social Network” sequel, “The Social Reckoning,” opened to a disappointing $5.5 million last weekend and has already fallen completely out of the top 10. And Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary “Musk” — hampered, perhaps, by social platform resistance and a four-hour runtime — grossed just $306,702 this weekend.
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