A24’s documentary You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, opened in second place at the North American box office on the weekend of October 16 to 18 with an estimated $15.0 million from only 855 theatres, according to Box Office Mojo. That is an average of $17,543 per theatre, the highest of any film in the top ten. The film follows Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted founder of Theranos, for 34 days before she went to prison and then for three more years, according to ABC7 and Euronews, and it runs two hours and 54 minutes. It carries a 99 percent Tomatometer score from 117 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and was first shown in a secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival on September 6, Euronews reported.
The case that this is a breakout is made by the per-screen numbers. At $17,543 per theatre, You Can See Everything earned about twice as much per location as Street Fighter, which averaged $8,671 and finished first, and several times as much as the other new films: Whalefall averaged $2,610 and Sense and Sensibility $2,848. It reached second place from 855 theatres, fewer than a quarter of the 3,575 used by Street Fighter, which means its $15.0 million came from roughly 24 percent of the screens. Its 99 percent critics’ score from 117 reviews is far above Street Fighter’s 42 percent and Sense and Sensibility’s 76 percent.
The case for caution is that the total remains modest in the wider picture. The film’s $15.0 million is less than half of Street Fighter’s $31.0 million, and it is a documentary with a running time of nearly three hours, which limits the number of showings a theatre can schedule in a day compared with the one-hour-and-33-minute running time of Other Mommy. Its worldwide gross, according to Box Office Mojo, is the same as its domestic figure, $15.0 million, because no international total has been reported yet. A24’s other film in the top ten, Primetime, earned $1.7 million in its fourth weekend and has a total of $45.3 million, so the studio’s older release is much smaller than the new one.
The result matters because it shows an audience for non-fiction cinema that reaches beyond festival crowds, since the film moved from a secret screening at Telluride to a nationwide release in under six weeks. A strong opening for a near three-hour documentary may encourage distributors to back other long-form films with a clear subject. Euronews reported that Fielder lived with Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, during production, and that the film is his feature directorial debut. For the wider industry, the per-theatre figure will be watched as a signal of how far a specialty film can expand when the reviews are this strong.
You Can See Everything launched in 855 theatres and finished second, with the best per-theatre average of the weekend. Whether it can hold on as it expands will depend on audiences matching the 99 percent critics’ score. With A24 reporting a per-theatre average more than double the weekend’s winner, the film has started from a position of strength.
