“You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim‘s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, has finally arrived in theaters after a marketing campaign that was shrouded in secrecy. Well, it looks like audiences could hardly stand the anticipation. Crowds eager to ensure they didn’t suffer any spoilers turned out in force for Thursday preview showings of the A24 documentary. It earned an impressive $1.75 million from just 855 screens.
Heading into the weekend, “You Can See Everything” was expected to earn between $7 million to $8 million. That’s a massive figure for a nonmusic documentary (Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” racked up $92.8 million in its debut, for instance). But films that don’t have a banger playlist, such as 2018’s “RBG,” which earned $14.4 million, were considered to be sizable box office successes with far, far smaller grosses. “You Can See Everything” earned half of “RBG’s” total in a single weekend.
Related Stories
The film has several things going for it. We simply cannot get enough of Holmes, the Theranos founder who was celebrated in glossy magazine profiles as a next-gen Einstein until it turned out that her blood testing tech was a fraud. There’s been bestselling books, podcasts, an Alex Gibney documentary, and an Emmy-winning series featuring Amanda Seyfried as the Silicon Valley scoundrel. But the market for all things Holmes apparently still hasn’t been saturated.
Plus, Fielder has developed a cult following through his Comedy Central parody reality show “Nathan for You,” and his HBO docu-comedy “The Rehearsal,” where he has raised social awkwardness into an art form. And Oppenheim is riding high after another A24 hit, “Primetime,” which stars Robert Pattinson as “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen. It’s earned more than $42 million domestically on a $15 million budget.
“You Can See Everything” faces some serious competition this weekend, including the opening of Paramount’s “Street Fighter.” But based on its Thursday previews, the Fielder and Oppenheim documentary is out for blood.