“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 film.
The nearly three-hour movie — first revealed last month at a secretive screening at the Telluride Film Festival — is only playing in 855 theaters this weekend. (In contrast, the weekend’s number one movie, “Street Fighter,” is playing 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 Elizabeth Holmes’ rise and fall — founding blood-testing startup Theranos, attracting support from many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, then ultimately being sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding in investors — has already been told in books, podcasts, scripted miniseries, and other documentaries.
But “You Can See Everything”’s filmmakers were given extensive access to Holmes and her family in the month before she went to jail, and the involvement of “The Rehearsal” creator Nathan Fielder — who co-directed the film with Lance Oppenheim — made the whole thing even more intriguing.
While 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 screening for tonight. I found exactly one with seats available that weren’t in the front row. (Yes, of course I’m going.)
And TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling already got to see it on Thursday. She wrote that the enigmatic Holmes finally seems to have met her match in Fielder, a deadpan comedian who’s arguably 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 discussion 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. And Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary “Musk” — hampered, perhaps, by resistance from social platforms and a four-hour runtime — made only $306,702 this weekend.
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Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City.
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