“You Can See Everything” is already a box office sensation, with a $15 million opening weekend (based on Sunday estimates). That’s the second-biggest opening weekend ever for a documentary.
The nearly three-hour film – first revealed last month at a secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival – is only playing in 855 theaters this weekend. (By contrast, the weekend’s number one movie, “Street Fighter,” played in 3,575.) But it had a reported 2,000 sellout screenings, and the reviews are overwhelmingly positive; “You Can See Everything” currently has a score of 99% on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.
The story of the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes — founding the blood-testing startup Theranos, attracting support from many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, and eventually being sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors — has already been told in books, podcasts, TV shows and other documentaries.
But “You Can See Everything”‘s filmmakers got extensive access to Holmes and her family in the month before she went to prison, and the involvement of “The Rehearsal” creator Nathan Fielder – who co-directed the film with Lance Oppenheim – made it even more interesting.
Although I haven’t seen the movie myself, I can at least attest to the difficulty of finding tickets in Manhattan: I spent a good chunk of yesterday trying to find a showing for tonight, and I found exactly one with seats available that weren’t in the front row. (Yes, of course I will.)
TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling already saw it on Thursday. She wrote that the enigmatic Holmes finally met her match in Fielder, a deadpan comedian who is probably just as strange and mysterious as she is. Fielder’s month with Holmes is apparently just the beginning of what sounds like an increasingly surreal, metatextual odyssey.
The buzz surrounding “You Can See Everything” may make 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 out of the top 10 entirely. And Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary “Musk” — hampered, perhaps, by resistance from social platforms and a four-hour runtime — made only $206.70 this weekend.
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